I installed a new mother board and when the cd rom is hooked up to the mother board it will not even get to the bios. If i disconnect the cd rom it gets past the bios but won't boot to floppy. I hear it check the floppy but it doesn't load the start up tools. I have tried 2 different cd roms(they are both old)and it does the same thing with both. The cables are on correctly and are new. This has me stumped. If anyone has any suggestions I would appreciate it. Thanks

"Hooking up" the CD as you call it, if cabled correctly, should NEVER prevent the system from booting to the "Setup" screen; however, a CD on the same cable with a hard drive.....with both set at Master will do it EVERY time http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif. Since I dont know how much experience you have, I am dealing with the most fundamental issues first...other troubleshooting steps can be taken if this doesnt fix it.

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Will XP save Me ?

I have some experience. The jumpers are set correctly. When the CD Rom is connected the monitor doesn't recieve a signal from the computer at all. So some how it is halting the whole process. I know that there isnt much to a CD Rom and that is what is so confusing here. Also, if I leave the CD Rom off the system runs the Bios, finds the Hard Drive and floppy, but the screen goes blank after bios.It wont load Operating Sys from Hard Drive, or start up tools from floppy. I appriciate any and all suggestions.

I Need Help,

How old and what type/model HDD you trying to use?
all of this is 100% a guess, because I really dont have enough info to really solve this issue, but some older HDD's have a probelm when you hook a CD Rom in there, and you may also have an issue between the HDD and the MoBo.....

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What I meant by what I said is hopefully less confusing then the contemplation of the question that led to the confusion in the 1st place.......

What size (wattage) and how old is the power supply ??


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-- (Question: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?')

"Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand."
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First, try placing the CD-ROM to the secondary IDE controller. If that dosen't work, try leaving the drive off and setup the BIOS to autodetect the three remaining IDE interfaces, save the BIOS settings, power down then reconnect the CD-ROM drive and try. Now, is the CD-ROM a true ATAPI device or is it one that runs through a controller card? (And yes, I read the post and realize your connecting it to the motherboard. Some of the older CD-ROM drives that worked with controller cards did in fact have 40-Pin ribbon connectors.) If this is the case, your going to have to either load the appropriate drivers for the CD-ROM at bootup or borrow an ATAPI CD-ROM drive to get past this during the initial installation. As for the floppy, make sure it is firmly seated at both ends and the connector is seated correctly at both ends. With some floppy drives, you can be off a pin and still get detected...it just dosen't work. As a last resort, can you reset the BIOS to Fail Safe Defaults or Factory Defaults? If so, try this out. Hope some of this helps.

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Older CD ROM drives can do that, usually if the CD ROM is a Panasonic or Sony interface. The proprietary interfaces are controlled by the sound card rather than the IDE controller, and if plugged into the IDE controller the machine will refuse to boot at all, no picture, nothing...

You can either try a sound card with a controller, look up the model number of the CD ROM and find drivers, or get a newer CD ROM. If you're planning to use win95 or later your best bet will be a newer CD ROM, since most Panasonic drives do not have win95 drivers available and it's difficult to get them to work with anything later than win3.11. Been there, done that...I got a Panasonic interface 2X drive to work with a win95 machine, but it wasn't easy...I think I left some hair on the floor...

I'd say try a newer CD ROM. The one you're using is most likely a Panasonic interface and more trouble than it will be worth to make it work.

As for the rest of the problem, some good suggestions have been made but more detailed info might be needed before we can have a good idea what else to try. Need to know system info and periferals you're working with, and if there is actually an OS on the hard drive, what is it? Might be as simple as just restoring the registry...First thing I can think of is reset BIOS to defaults.

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