Boot Drive Failure message at startup

[navyjay]

Hi All,

I just got all new parts to piece together my system.

Proc: AMD Athlon 64 2800+ (w/ std fan)
Mobo: DFI Lanparty UT 250Gb
Video: Powercolor Radeon 9700 Pro
HD: Seagate 200GB IDE
Mem: Mushkin 1GB (2x512MB) DDR400 PC3200 SDRAM
PSU: JustPC 450W

I installed everything in my case and I believe everything is correct. I get power to everything, all fans are running, and I can start up the machine with full access to the BIOS. The problem is, I get the "Boot Drive Failure" message at startup regardless of the boot device order. This is after the memory test and drive detection. I know I can get the bios to correctly detect the Pri-master HD and Sec-master CDROM IDE devices, but neither will boot because of this error. Obviously the HD shouldn't boot since there's no boot sector installed on it yet, but the CDROM won't load from a bootable CD.

Some googling and I found that some people had HD issues that caused this. The thing is, I get the message even when I remove the HD and CDROM from the system (which I'm not sure is unexpected).

Anyone have any suggestions? They would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Jason

 

[navyjay]

Forgot to mention that the error comes immediately after the "Verifying DMI Pool" message.

 

[ZYFER]

you will get that message when it can't boot to anything, try a known bootable cd, and set it to boot from cd in the bios

 

[navyjay]

It's not that simple... I've tried multiple bootable OS CDs (windows and linux). The same error appears regardless of what's in the drive. I know when it's trying to boot from CD, because it says "CD Boot..." right before the error.

 

[montag451]

That might just mean that the jumpers/cable are wrong.

Make sure that
1] Jumpers on drives are set correctly - don't use cable select. Don't use single drive. I know you have checked 4 times, but check carefully once more.
2] The cables are plugged in tight enough - and molex. Also that the blue connector on IDE cable goes to the mobo, the other end of the cable goes to the master drive, the middle connector goes to the slave.
3] Try different cables if still a prob. if they were folded too enthusiastically by the mobo packers, then that might have damaged the cables.

Sorry can't think of anything else for now, apart from resetting BIOS.

Ah - is the voltage for the RAM set to 2.7v or 2.8v?

 

[navyjay]

Montag, I like the way you think. Those are good troubleshooting steps and are the order that I would put them in. I didn't try different cables, but I found the solution by trying a different cd drive. Instead of the old POS CD-ROM drive I was using (7+ years), I tried a slightly newer (5+ years) CD-RW drive to read from my bootable CDs. This solved the problem, alas.

I'm certain the drive was just busted since it was taken from a heap of junk that hasn't worked for many years. I changed the jumpers from each of the three settings at least twice each with no luck.

Thanks for all your time!