[manomina]

My son had a jump drive (thumb drive) in his USB, desktop, and it frroze on him. He then hard powered it down and when he tried to reboot he gets this error. I have gone into the bios and check things out and nothing has changed, There is nothing in any of his drives, the jumpers are correct on both his hard drives and still get this message. I have tried booting them independantly and still the same thing.

Does anyone have any ideas? I am thinking something got corrupt or deleted and just probably needs to be repaired. Your thoughts?

[kniht]

What exactly is the error message?

Can you boot into Safe Mode?

[manomina]

The message is

Remove disks or other media
Hit any key to continue.

No, I can not get into safe mode, only the bios. I brough the computer home and I'll look at the hard drive with my enclosure and then I'll try to repair or reload the OS, unless there is something else I can try.....

[manomina]

Ok, my son has an old desktop.....a P3 running XP pro, two hard drives, 1 burner, 1 cd rom. One night he had his jump drive in the usb and his system froze on him. He hard powered it down but when he booted back up he gets a message:

Remove disks or other media
Hit any key to continue.

Nothing is in his CD roms......so I took his hard drives out and hooked the first one up to my enclosure and didn't see an OS. I hooked the other one up and it would not read it. So I tried putting that back into his pc, booting up with a bootable cd to reinstall the OS.

The system is set to boot from cd rom and it sees them both and it see the hard drive. I only have that 1 hard drive in now. It will not boot up on the bootable cd, I tried the cd in my computer and it will boot, but it won't in his. I have looked through the bios and I see nothing strange.....

I just hooked his hard drive up as a slave to my desktop and I get an error that something is in the A drive, I remove his disk and it boots fine.

Is his Hard drive toast?

[manomina]

Ok, so the one hard disk is bad, I backed up the second one and when I put it back in his computer with a bootable CD to install an OS on it (it boots in my computer) all I am getting is:

Remove Disks or other media

I have the BIOS set to boot off the CD Rom......and it reads it, but doesn't boot. Is there a function that I need to tell it to boot or something?

[ntlgnce]

First it sounds like from your last post that the back of the HD the jumper is set to Master, if you have two masters, also some older hard drives (or older computers) dont seem to like the slave setting, Set them to cable select and see what happens.

Or, Is the jump drive still in if so take it out.? Check to see that there is nothing in the 3.5 floppy, and check to see that there is not a CD in the Cd or DVD drive.

The thing that I think it that would cause this kind of problem is the jumpers on the backs of the CD drives and Hard drives.. You need to set the HD to Master on the primary IDE on the end of the ribbon, and The CD drives, should be on the secondary IDE, and they should be set to CS, or cable select. As some older computers do not like the Slave settings.

Try just one Hard drive and one CD drive, (hd to master, CD to cable select).

Make sure they are plugged in and the power is attached, (when its booting check to see that everything is powering up, I had a Power supply that had a bad plug,). Also the Ram if you have bad or the ram is not seated properly, (I think I got a weird error like this once)..

[manomina]

Thank you! I doubled checked the cd roms and one is master, slave. The hard drives were set to CS, but I never like using that because......well.....not positive on how that works. Does that mean the first connection from the mother board would be the master HD, that the OS should be? In the bios it does show the HD as master (with the jumpers) so I assume it was fine. I will try it CS and see what happens. I have the 3.5 floppy disabled and the cd is the bootable cd.

I have an old Maxtor and all it says is J50=Jumper, On=Master/Single, Off=Slave. Nothing about cable select. The pins are, by looking at it with the power on the right side (facw up) pins look like this. :::.:

[manomina]

The other hard drive has to be bad because I can't see it when I hook it up to my enclosure and I just tried it as CS and it didn't help.

[manomina]

DOH! I realized my problem, now that I am bald from pulling all my hair out.... The bootable CD I had, is bootable with a system that ALREADY has an OS....not a blank HD. I used my other XP Disk and it works fine.

[ntlgnce]

Cool Thanks for telling us what solved the problem, Now if you could be so kind to mark the thread as solved.

Thanks,
And Congrats....

[kniht]

Originally Posted by manomina

now that I am bald from pulling all my hair out.

At least you had a choice! I got there naturally.

Anyway, thanks for posting the fix. Amazing how the simple fixes pass us all by!

Keeping this one in my notes.

[manomina]

I marked it solved when I solved it. My button on top says "unsolved".

Talk about easy fixes I'll tell a story. Years ago when I was a couple years into fixing computers I kept getting an error message to the effect that I needed a bottable hard drive....no OS found....I called my tech friend and my computer sat there for 3 days until he finally came over. He looked at it, ejected the floppy disk, rebooted and I was all set. At least I have a story to tell clients when they think they messed something up.....