HD issue on start up.

[Peter.Cort]

before the restart i get BSOD but it doesn't stay, its up for a fraction of a second then goes back to the beginning of the start up sequence.

 

[Preacher]

Format it / run a chkdsk.

 

[Peter.Cort]

it happens with 5 drives and i highly doubt that its a hd issue at this point. and can i format the drive through the bios? and the whole reason that im going through this is because i don't have a windows disk so i have a few hd's w/ xp pro/home on them and i figured i could just pop those in and it would boot up.

 

[Peter.Cort]

could it possibly be that my psu isn't giving the pc enough power to boot up?
its a 400W psu and the 12v is 14a

when i start up i get to the start in safe mode. w/ networking, command prompt, last known good config, and start normally. then i get a load bar on the last two and then BSOD...

 

[eyeCpc]

You are still missing the point on needing to install a fresh copy of Windows not expecting a copy installed on another system to work there. Generally usb drives don't make good boot drives except for flash drives since those are a different type.

You have to set one drive known to be good as the default and need an installation disk for the version you plan to run. The only time a previously installed copy will load is in the case of businesses where they use identical systems and clone drives. XP and Vista alike create a new hardware profile when first installed on a system.

 

[Peter.Cort]

but the problem is it won't recognize any IDE drives and I don't have any SATA drives (referring to dvd/cd drives.) So when I put in a XP installation disk, or a linux disk it won't recognize so I can't load it. Even going into the bios and having it auto check for IDE devices doesn't turn anything up.

 

[Peter.Cort]

bump up to the top. help would be appreciated........

 

[eyeCpc]

Pages #30-#32 are the ones to look at in the manual. There's an option for auto detection of ide type drives there as well as the setting for having the bios do that on it's own as part of the normal post. The default bios settings should already be seeing that.

With different drives, cables, and humper settings there are two other things to consider there. One would be the sockets are bad? not likely with both, or the board is seeing a problem. Loading the optimized defaults would be the first thing you could try to see any of the drives were then seen on the post screen or in the bois setup itself.

 

[Peter.Cort]

ok. so went into the bios and currently its set to IDE Channel 0 Master. its on auto and thats the optimized default. It has the auto detection option that if you select a little screem pops up that says DETECTING IDE DRIVE and nothing comes up after it. Same with IDE Channel 1 Master. i've put drives with stuff on them in both IDE slots. no dice. The post screen doesn't see anything. and the optimized options are the defaults.

I'm trying to install reactOS on this computer for now since I don't have a xp disk and it loaded on my laptop, so I know I can boot from it. Also other things that boot from the startup don't work that work on other systems of mine.

 

[Peter.Cort]

OMG!!!!!!!!!!!! I got it to recognize a HDD. I reformatted the drive and shoved it in there. Ok so now goes trying to boot from my reactOS cd.