First boot - need help

[constable]

Heres what I have:

seagate 120gb 7200 rpm IDE drive
DVDrom cdrw combo drive (made by AOpen)
Chaintech VNF3-250 mobo
Athlon64 3000+

Everything powered up and ran after I pressed the power button, but after a few seconds the bios gave me this message:

>Boot from CD:
>
>
>
>PXE -E61 Media Test Failure, Check Cable
>Insert boot cd and press enter.

I put chaintech's driver cd in the bay and pressed enter, but I got the same message. I checked the cables, they are correctly oriented. I tried putting the primary ide into the cd drive and the secondary into the HD then vice versa, but still the same message. I tried chaintech support but no ones answering the fone.

Any ideas?

 

[ross8425]

maybe the computer cant find an OS and thats why you are getting this message? have you tried starting the pc with the windows / linux cd in to see if it loads setup?

 

[constable]

hmm, not yet but arent I supposed to configure the bios/install mobo drivers BEFORE installing the OS?

 

[constable]

-deleted-

 

[mechBgon]

The message you're seeing is a message from your motherboard's network controller. It's trying to boot from the network because the motherboard didn't find any other bootable devices yet. No worries

Go ahead and put in your Windows CD and reset the system. If the motherboard is set to try to boot from CD, then you'll see a prompt saying "Press any key to boot from CD" and go ahead and press the Enter key. It'll commence Windows Setup. Since you chose a "regular" IDE hard drive, things should be nice and straightforward, just keep following the on-screen prompts.

What would be really useful is if you can pre-download the whole Service Pack 2 for WinXP and have that ready on a CD. When your system gets Windows installed, ideally you would then

• First, before you forget, set strong passwords on all your user accounts to stave off share-hopping worms (example: h4ck-Th1s! would be reasonably strong due to length, non-dictionary nature and the inclusion of symbols, numerals and upper+lower-case letters)
• Install SP2 and enable its firewall BEFORE plugging your computer into the broadband modem, assuming you have broadband
• then install your chipset drivers after SP2 is installed and the firewall is ready
• now install your video-card drivers (note: AFTER the chipset drivers, not before)
• now install your antivirus software
• now you're ready to plug your computer into your modem, now that your defenses are up
• Immediately update your antivirus software (might take several updates to get fully up-to-speed, eg Norton)
• Hit Windows Update to see if there are any new Critical Updates to be had
• Enable Data Execution Prevention for all software (see the Resources page of my photo guide, it's under Ongoing prevention)
• Install Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 1.2.1 and see if you need to attend to anything else.

Hope that helps

 

[constable]

Thanks, that helps a lot. However, Im getting a little worried - I got to the point where I must create a new partition on the new HD, but it has been stuck at 20% formatted for the past 15 minutes. The HD led is showing only minimal activity and I am not hearing any spooling of the hard drive OR cd drive.

 

[mechBgon]

Hmm, you might want to just hit the Reset button and take another run at it if it doesn't get over that. Do you have a pretty good power supply running the show there? Quality can be really important these days and we generally judge that by the reputation of the manufacturer (Antec, Enermax, Fortron, PC and Power & Cooling are some good ones). Having enough (or more than enough) wattage is the next criteria

 

[ross8425]

installing xp ? i assume yes. do quick format and see if that allows you to install windows