[rickyjo]

Hey, I'm building a system, picked up some cheap parts here and there, and viola, $120 system.

The unit has an HP mainboard 800mhz, a P4 2.6Ghz processor, 300Watt PSU, and all was well until until I actually attached a known good XP HDD to the otherwise completed system. It failed to boot, resulting in only a flashing underscore after the HP/P4 boot screen, no beeps. Same thing happens if I try to boot from an XP CD.

I grabbed another XP HDD from another computer and repeated the failing sequence.

As a last ditch effort I grabbed a Windows 98 HDD from an old computer in my closet...and wouldn't you know it worked fine.


I was wondering if it could be the PSU is too low wattage, or if the BIOS need flashing. I unfortunately do not have easy access to a better PSU, and don't want to flash BIOS if I don't have to.
Any other ideas/advice would be appreciated.

The steps I have taken:
1. Attempted to boot from an XP CD
2. Cleared CMOS
3. Tested both XP HDDs in other functional computers, both work fine.

I hope I gave all the information you folks need. I'm not really too hopeful here.

[Deathblow]

You can't just take a hard drive with XP on it, and put it in any system, and have it boot. It has system specific files installed. This however, doesn't explain the booting from CD problem. Try booting from the CD without a HD installed and see what happens.

[Wanderer2]

You used drives that didn't have a master boot record [flashing cursor]. The 98 disk worked because it did have a mbr.

You also need to understand not all ide controllers talk the same. So one's track0 is anothers track1. Format a hd in place as bootable and then see if it boots.

[Dan Penny]

Not having an MBR on a HDD won't stop the machine from booting.

If these "XP HDD's" are EIDE (most likely with that motherboard) are the HDD jumpers configured correctly?

If you are using the CS (Cable Select) position BOTH drives on the data cable must be jumpered as CS, and you must use an 80 conductor/40 pin cable, and have the Master drive at the end of the cable, and the Slave drive on the middle connector.