boot problems

I have a 6 month old pc that has suddenly developed problems booting. It runs the memory check then stops on "wait". There is only one beep. I then went into the bios and did an auto search on the hDD/CD drives (I have 2 hdd and 1 cd drive and a cd re-writer), the bios couldn't recognise these. I've checked all the cables etc. Any idea's of where to go next.

PC chips 810lmr board
Athlon t/b 1000 chip
256mb pc133 memory
4.2gb hdd
2.1gb hdd
16x cd rom
CD-RW

Running Windows 98se.

Thanks

 

Hi fragglemoo

I would try removing the IDE cables and seeing if you can boot to a floppy boot disk. If so try adding back one IDE device at a time. You might want to remove any extra cards (like sound and network) until you can get the system to see the hard drive again.

 

Hi

i've just re-set the BIOS, changed the IDE cables and removed the CD drives, the pc boots and both hdd are there. I've tried the cd-drive in another pc and its dead - so its been put in the bin. The re-writer works fine in another pc but when its put back in my pc I go back to square one. I've swapped hdd/cd's about and re-set the bios to take this in to account. But I can only get the HDD worknig without the rewriter. arghhhhh

 

I don't know your set up but most R/W drivers like to be a master on the secondary IDE channel. When you were moving stuff around was the seconday channel able to detect anything?

 

Hi,
As lurker1 said you should have your cdrw set as master on the second ide port of your mb. Your primary ide port should have both your hard drives on it sharing a cable. You main hard drive should be set to master and the second one should be set to slave.
Once that is verified I would do an auto detect from bios and then reboot.
Good luck,
Hamill

 

Hi

Managed to get it working but as secondary slave. Thanks for your help.