Chainik
04-01-2005, 01:19 PM
We have (had, to be exact) Win2000. At some point we began having problems accessing floppy drive or cd-rom. BIOS could detect them. Windows could see them (in My Computer), but once you try to read from them, you get "Invalid command" message. I can't say exactly when this started to happen. Our PSU died, but if I remember it right, we used cd-rom after the PSU replacement. Maybe not - I am not sure.
The strangest thing is that it would not read form external cd-rom connected to USB port either.
We decided to reinstall the windows. Things went fine until we got to the second phase of installation. Once there, installer could not read from CD again. It didn't give any option like "please reinsert the cd" or "choose another drive". It just stated: cannot read from CD, please hit enter to retry.
Since no valuble information was left on that harddrive, I reformatted it (with fdisk).
I removed a harddrive with Win 98 from an older computer, hooked it as master, and the newly formatted harddrive as slave - to copy installation files from CD to the harddrive. Win 98 could perfectly read from floppy and cd.
When booted, Win98 did not see the slave harddrive! BIOS does not show any primary slave either. (All jumpers were set correctly). It didn't see secondary slave either, when we hooked the harddrive that way.
Changed the cable. No result. Then tried to hook up the empty harddrive as master, boot from diskette and take a look at the harddrive, maybe run fdisk again...
To make the long story short, things got worse. BIOS shows the same IDE, no matter which harddrive is hooked up as a master. It keeps showing the 98 harddrive.
Floppy shows up in the list of installed drives, but now disappeared from the list of boot devices, and now the computer generates FDC error at start. Windows 98 don't see floppy or cd-rom.
Last time I entered BIOS, I didn't make a record of what time it shows. Perhaps, the battery is going dead. But if the time is correct, does it mean our motherboard nedds to be replaced?
Please comment on this situation. I am getting tired and frustrated.
Thank you!
The strangest thing is that it would not read form external cd-rom connected to USB port either.
We decided to reinstall the windows. Things went fine until we got to the second phase of installation. Once there, installer could not read from CD again. It didn't give any option like "please reinsert the cd" or "choose another drive". It just stated: cannot read from CD, please hit enter to retry.
Since no valuble information was left on that harddrive, I reformatted it (with fdisk).
I removed a harddrive with Win 98 from an older computer, hooked it as master, and the newly formatted harddrive as slave - to copy installation files from CD to the harddrive. Win 98 could perfectly read from floppy and cd.
When booted, Win98 did not see the slave harddrive! BIOS does not show any primary slave either. (All jumpers were set correctly). It didn't see secondary slave either, when we hooked the harddrive that way.
Changed the cable. No result. Then tried to hook up the empty harddrive as master, boot from diskette and take a look at the harddrive, maybe run fdisk again...
To make the long story short, things got worse. BIOS shows the same IDE, no matter which harddrive is hooked up as a master. It keeps showing the 98 harddrive.
Floppy shows up in the list of installed drives, but now disappeared from the list of boot devices, and now the computer generates FDC error at start. Windows 98 don't see floppy or cd-rom.
Last time I entered BIOS, I didn't make a record of what time it shows. Perhaps, the battery is going dead. But if the time is correct, does it mean our motherboard nedds to be replaced?
Please comment on this situation. I am getting tired and frustrated.
Thank you!