Legit Reviews

ok i just bought this computer from a friend and yes he is trust worthy, i have looked around and couldnt find help anywhere.

this is the motherboard (or at least looks almost identical to it)

http://www.legitreviews.com/article.php?aid=162

the problem is that when i turn it on it does all the normal crap but when it tries to actually use the harddrive and go onto it i get a quick blue screen and my comp restarts. that harddrive was a western digital 120 gig, then my friend brought me over a maxtor 120 gig to replace it but when i put that one in it tells me to insert a boot device, i have a cd dvd combo drive and when i try to do a windows xp setup on either hard drive it tells me it cant find a harddrive.

odd thing, when i turn it on and it detects IDE crap i see it flash the name of the harddrive so i know it is there.... but when i go into the CMOS it doesnt show up at all, however, the cd dvd drive does show up 0.o.....

i tried rearranging the IDEs with one another and it does nothing, if you look at the pic of the mother board, the IDE on its side is the one that the cd drive is in and i tried the harddrive in all 3...

i know about master and slave and have that right, but the thing im wondering is, could there be a conflict between the harddrives and cd dvd drive?? or he told me that his business partener he got it from used RAID i think with a 250 gig harddrive and the 120, they said it ran fine but took then 250 out and didnt test the 120 alone -_-.....

i know nothing about RAID so yeah... HELP PLEASE >.<!!!!!

Welcome to the forums

Sounds like just it is probably just a simple thing you are overlooking in the BIOS or on a jumper somwhere.
If you are using an PATA IDE hard drive and it is your primary master boot device with windows and all that jazz, you'll want to make sure the jumper on the hard drive is in the primary or master position and that it is plugged into the "IDE1" or primary IDE slot on the motherboard.

If you have it all plugged into the correct places, double check your connections and make sure you have them plugged in all the way and that the cables aren't plugged in backwards somehow.

Next thing you should do is go into the BIOS and check under IDE devices and set the stuff for auto detect or something similar and see if it lists the hard drive correctly in the BIOS.

You also want to make sure that the boot device order is correct, listing your primary hard drive first, then followed by (usually) your optical drive of choice.

If you are still having issues, try booting with just the bare minimum. Unplug the optical and floppy drives completely and just have the HDD plugged into the IDE1 slot and see what happens.

Are you sure your memory or processor is not giving you errors because of a bad setting and causing the blue screen? Try looking for an option in the BIOS to "Load Fail Safe Defaults" or something like that and just start over.

Do you have an OS installed on the drive or not? You could try using fdisk or something and making sure there are no partitions on the HDD that are making it not want to boot correctly. Just reformatting the disk is a good way to start back from scratch if you don't have any valuable data you can't afford to lose.

You say you have tried other hard drives? No luck with ANY of the other drives? Since you said it was in RAID before, it may still think that there is a RAID array of some kind, possibly why it keeps asking for a disk. I don't know much about RAID, so someone else might want to step in and offer assistance in this area. I'd say just browse through the BIOS and set as many things back to default or automatic as you can.

Try booting with just one stick of RAM and then the other. Even try with other RAM if you have some.

Are you sure the HDD is not messed up?

Double check all your connections and make sure everything is plugged in all the way and that you have plugged in all necessary power plugs on the HDD and motherboard. There are often extra power plugs on newer motherboards that you aren't used to seeing (like a regular 4-pin molex connector) and you should usually plug all of these power sources in to make sure you aren't missing anything.

Still problems?

i tried most of that and no luck, im talking to a friend on mine about bios raid settings crap but i dunno, thanks for the help though ^___^

the problem is that when i turn it on it does all the normal crap but when it tries to actually use the harddrive and go onto it i get a quick blue screen and my comp restarts. that harddrive was a western digital 120 gig

I just had this same problem after I installed my new motherboard. I would get a blue screen flash quickly and start to see the XP splash screen before it would automatically reboot again. I had to repair the XP OS using the installation CD. After that, I was able to get in.

**Note** Make sure you update XP again. It seems the repair utility wipes out all updates. I couldn't get the automatic update to work so I downloaded the XP SP2 from microsoft. After installing that, I was able to use the automatic update site.

Windows XP SP2 link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... layLang=en

sigh...press F6 @ begining the installation, since the hdd is on raid/sata u need driver b4 the installation, press F6 when it ask u and put in the driver floppy when it ask u to, u can find the hdd bee ndected it afterward

i know about that but i dont have the driver disk.....

you can usually DL that stuff from the web somewhere. Try at the site for the manufacturer of your motherboard. Then just put it on a Floppy disk.

sounds like a driver issue to me. either he installed new hardware on an old operating system or there is a driver conflict.(already mentioned)

try using differant sticks or ram if there is more than one stick. Try one at a time.
Also try booting into safe mode, if that works uninstall most everything in startup, or at least disabling them. if you need help with that let us know. if you cant even boot into safe mod then.....hmmmmmmm. more than likely ram.

It has to be one of 2 things, driver, or ram. let me know if i am wrong anyone...

looks like we've all had this problem once..my problem then was the ram..so ima stick to my suggestion on that...but tis true it could be somthin other than that