Hi, I am having trouble booting my pc. It seems to recognise my hard,cdrom and floppy drives in cmos setup utility. during post it says primary and secondary not found and lastly says "DISK BOOT FAILURE INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". So I do it and it says it again. I have recently purchased all parts and put it together. GIgabyte GA7VAXP MOBO with a kt400 chipset it has a 333 fsb, AMD XP2100+, 512MB DDR266.
My manual says the 333 only supports 333DDR{which is new to me not finding that in my research}. Could that be the reason? The hard drive is new, SEAGATE 7200rpm ATA100 HD. But the floppy and CDrom are drives I had hanging about. I know they MUST NEED drivers but how Could I!!@$#!^%. PLEASE HELP this NEWBIE.

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If I understand your questions, it sounds like you have your Master and Slave jumpers set wrong on your drives, you have the wrong setting in the BIOS, or your connections are off on your IDE ports. It doesn't seem likely that the RAM is the problem based on the message you report and based on the fact that RAM is almost always downward compatible.

I would urge you to check your drives to make sure they are configured properly for Master and Slave. The drive at the end of the cable is usually Master and the one on the connector in between is usually Slave. You may have to experiment with this including trying Cable Select if the other options don't work. I would try to set up your Primary IDE channel first and worry about the Secondary after you get the Primary working.

I would probably first check in BIOS to make sure you are set to AUTODETECT all IDE/PCI settings.

Also, I would double check IDE cable connectors to make sure they are in tightly and that they are facing the right way.

Good luck,
Budfred

Edit:

BTW, your drives generally don't need drivers installed, they are automatically installed with Windoze. The only things that would need drivers would be video, sound, and other accessories. Even with these, you can generally limp along until they are installed.

Budfred again

Thanks BudFred,
But not much luck, I have the hard drive plugged into IDE1 on the MOBO it only goes in one way. the jumper is set up as Master, CMOS recognises it as so. It is set to auto.

The CDROM is plugged into IDE2 the jumper is set to master{ i have a full ATX tower the cables I have will not allow me to slave it}. The cable on both ends also go only one way. CMOS recognises the cdrom as IDE secondary master. It is set to auto.

The Floppy light is on from power on till I shutdown.

When booting I get the same message.
The drives come from a Presario 2100 and they did work fine.

The floppy cable is the one that is either reversed or off by a pin.

Also make sure the boot order in BIOS is set to something other than floppy first.

If you are certain your IDE cables are inserted properly (they can fool you sometimes), you may want to try Cable Select jumper setting on the HD to see if that helps. Also, there is clearly something wrong with the floppy setup as mjc said.

Budfred

Thank you,
Still nothing. I have removed the Floppy and the cdrom. I have the harddisk on IDE 1. I have carefully checked and rechecked conection, it only goes in one way and the socket is boxed. I have placed the jumper on cable select.

1st Boot device is HDD-O and I have disabled 2nd and 3rd boot device.
I am not sure this makes a diff, but the boot order is SCSI. There is a SATA and a RAID selection in the boot order but I thought that was for IDE 3 and 4. CMOS has no problem seeing what I put in and where I do it.


So, now as it is when I power up it goes through post and then I see "Primary and Socondary channel: Drive not Found". it then goes into "Detecting" I see my hard drive and a list of PCI devices, and at the bottom I see as usuall "Disk Boot Failure, Insert system Disk and press enter". I wish I could.

Make HD-0 the first boot device, make sure that the non-used IDE channels are disabled.

It does not appear that you have a SCSI boot device, so why is SCSI the first in boot order. I would not even have SCSI enabled for boot if you don't have a SCSI device. This may be THE problem. As mjc said, make HDD-0 or your floppy first boot device. If you make HDD-0 first, make floppy second and mayber CD third. It does not appear that you have a RAID or Serial ATA setup, so don't use either of those options.

Budfred

I powered up with the hard drive in IDE 1, Jumper set to cable select, in bios I set HDD-0 as first boot, disabled 2 and 3 boot devices. I still get the same thing. If it was one drive I would get another but nothing is working. This sucks. I need sleep. Thanks

When you get up again, it might be a good idea to go back to basics. Set your HD to Master again and set your BIOS to revert to Default values. Make sure this doesn't reestablish SCSI as the first boot device and then try to boot. All this tinkering may have thrown something else off when the problem may have been that SCSI setting from the get go. Good luck....

Budfred

Thanks mjc and Budfred, I did not see your last message budfred untill I was about to shut down. In my Advanced BIOS Features it says
SATA/RAID/SCSI Boot Order {SCSI}. I can change that SCSI to SATA or RAID but one of them will be selected, there is no disable.

That doesn't make sense since you don't seem to have any of those options. Have you moved through all the options? Are you sure there aren't options for floppy, HDD-0, and so on? I would double check this since this is probably the problem you are having. Trying to boot to a nonexistant SCSI drive is doomed to fail.

Budfred

ZURKE

Does the hard drive have an OS on it, or is it "as new" straight out of the box? If it's not formatted and has no OS on, then a message that there is no boot disk is correct. Can you get the floppy drive working?

If so, try a boot floppy. if that works, FDISK will be useable to see if the hard drive has a partition on it etc.

David

Hello, yes, it is a Brand new hard drive. I have tried the hard drive from the Presario which I had loaded windows onto. It worked fine for a bit. I think the new nieghborhood was a little to much for it. But I dont want that drive anyway. The CMOS recognises what ever I put in. Upon further booting I see. Primary and secondary channels: " drives not found". How can it be seen and then not. It is the same way with the cdrom. I tried to boot the floppy to no effect. You can see the board I have at " www.giga-byte.com/products/7vaxpultra.htm." I cannot shake the feeling it has to do with the raid function. from what I can see it controls the onboard IDE. In the end I will probably end up calling gigabyte so they can say" oh yes do this, sorry we did not put that in the manuel. What was youre card# again". Why would it not atleast see the HDD?

Have you partitioned and formated yur new drive? You make no mention of having done that. If it is not partitioned Windows will not see the drive, and if it is not formated Windows cannot use the drive.

Perhaps your IDE and Floppy Disk Controllers are disabled in the BIOS Setup.
I think the drives are being detected and that detection displayed but since the IDE controllers are disabled, then the drives cannot be seen and therefore the system files cannot be found also.

MY SETTINGS
Integrated Peripherals Setup Menu
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Intenal PCI/IDE : Both [Both Internal IDE Controllers Enabled]
IDE Primary Master : Auto
IDE Primary Slave : Auto
IDE Secondary Master : Auto
IDE Secondary Slave : Auto

Onboard FDD Controller : Enabled

PNP/PCI Configuration
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
PCI IDE 2nd Channel : Enabled
[this could disable the second IDE controller even when both enabled as above]

BIOS Features Setup
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Boot Sequence : A,C
Boot Up Floppy Seek : Enabled

If all these settings are ok I still think you should check over the BIOS settings.
Send me a personal message [PM], give me a return e-mail address and I'll send you a Word document which details [almost] all the BIOS Setup's possible settings [with my settings in red].

Here's a section of the "Boot Problem Troubleshooter" on this site
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/bios/set/periph_FDC.htm

Here's the start of the troubleshooter
http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/boot/walk/index.htm

Hi ZURKE

If the bios can "see" your drive, and the message "no boot device found message come up, the HARD disk is OK. At this point, you should reset the BIOS to boot from the floppy drive. Using a boot disk of any win9x version, you can then use FDISK to create partition/s on the HD, making the primary partition active. Reboot, to write the partition table data, then run FORMAT C: /s. This will format the HD, and transfer the boot files.

To install whichever OS you want to use, you will have to use a boot floppy with CD drivers such as the win98 disk. Just choose the "boot with CD ROM support, and run the install program on the CD.


David

Thanks dave and everyone,
Why dont they tell you that you can remove that little square on the back of the 3.5 drive so you can fit the ribbon cable? I realized it lastnight and partitioned and formatted the drive . I am in the process loaded windows now. I think it should be ok.

Thanks Again