Man, this upgrade is getting more expensive than I thought. So I got myself a Pentium D and a Intel D975XBX board today. Went and got some memory, case, power supply, and PCI-X video. After I moved everything I could move from my old system, I can't get the damn thing to boot with CD-ROM. Since my HW are old, they are all IDE so I can only run them off of the PATA connector, which supports two devices. The board also has 4 SATA connectors, but I don't feel like spending more money at the moment, maybe next year or something.

I can see them in the BIOS configuration and I've changed the boot sequency so it boots CD, HDD, Floppy. I also changed IDE boot squency to HDD then CD. Because of all the HW changes, I need to re-install Windows and it's not booting up with the CD. I get a blinking cursor and that's it. If I boot with HDD, it's fine, just get a BSOD eventually, which is expected due to HW changes.

Any idea? Thanks!

Leo

 

2 things:

1. massive hardware changes to WINDOWS can confuse it.

because of the driver and stuff, the HARDWARE info can totally screw up when you remove the HD from an old machine and install it into a new one.

lately, i never had any good luck with this. in fact, i'm doing a upgrade from a win2k to a win xp on laptop, which even has MORE STRICTER hardware ruiles.

the machine is a dell inspiron 8100. for fun, i tried to dump an image of a dell latitude 610 on it. our machines have a enterprise licensing scheme, so entering the stupid 25 digit code is not an issue.

2. plus you didnt SYSPREP the WINDOWS install.

every windows nt/2k/xp has a unique SID (security ID). so if you have a computer of 20 exactly same hardware machine, you just cant "GHOST" a HD of a machine that has the full set of software on it WITHOUT running SYSPREP.

SYSPREP will strip out the SID out of the machine. you then make an image of this HD and then copy it to the othe machines.

if you dont SYSPREP the initial machine, it will stop on boot up on the subsequent machines, saying it has an invalid SID, IIRC.

anyways, that's why your setup it FUBARed.

my recommendation is to buy a new HD, install windows on it.

make sure it is running fine, then connect the old HD as second HD.

then just extract the your DATA. dump data on CD so you just made a BACKUP.

now your APPLICATIONS needs to be installed. that's where the most time consuming thing is...

i guess you can assemble old machine again, back up data and run SYSREP on it.

read the microsoft techinfo for using it. there is an option to rerun MINI SETUP to recheck new HW settings, IIRC.

then take HD and connect to new setup...

at work, i virtually have images of the narrowed down set of dell machines. so if and when a user needs a new machine, i just back up their data, get them the new machine, dump the image and reload their data and off the go.

good luck on your setup...

 

wait... doesnt i have 2 IDE connections for 4 IDE devices?

or am i completely MISREADING your problems?

 

Do you have the devices jumped properly? If you have the CD drive and HDD drive on the same IDE cable you have to set your CD to master and IDE to slave, otherwise it will always try to boot with the HDD no matter what. The Sysprep thing does not apply here being that you aren't trying to run an image to install Windows on a networked PC.

 

Yeah, I don't think SYSPREP applies to me. I am doing fresh install on the HDD. I have my HDD partitioned so data is on the secondary partition. I currently have the HDD as master and CD drive as slave. So you are saying even if I changed the boot sequency to CD drive first then HDD I still can't do it if HDD is master? I hope you are right and I'll give that a try right now... Thanks!

Leo

 

nope, same result. It would look like it's trying to boot from the CD, but it would never get to "press any key to boot from CD..."

BTW, I thought my gf takes a long time when it comes to shopping... It took me over an hour to pick out a damn case! LOL!

Leo

 

Man, i've spend $380 so far and don't want to spend another $100 to get the 160GB SATA HDD. At first I thought I was just going to get new power supply, and memory and swap everything. Now I've got just about EVERYTHING for a new system. In fact, I moved my old system, which was in a full tower to a mid tower and it's fully functional. While this darn new system also have everthing and better, but not full functional, yet.

 

nv.... you did check the bios.

 

Damn I thought that would be the problem. I ran into the same situation a few months ago. Have you also placed the CD drive on the first connector of the IDE cable with the HDD on the second? There has to be a way to make this work without buying a SATA drive.

 

HA! I got it working! I guess the BIOS doesn't support BOTH of my CD-Writer and DVD-Writer. I suspected a BIOS CD-ROM support issue so I pulled my OLD CD-ROM from my PIII days and guess what? It's coping my Windows file as I am typing this. Thanks for your help guys!

 

Congrats bro Christmas came early for you

I thought you only had two IDE devices on the same cable my bad

 

You are right, I did. I meant that I swapped both (now third) of my CD/DVD-Writer drives to try to boot with the CD.

Thanks again!

 

btw, never put a HD and an optical drive on the same IDE bus.

slowest thing on the chain drops the entire speed to that.

so put all HD on one IDE bus and opticals/zip/etc on secondary bus.

 

yeah, i know, I that's how I had it before. But I have no choice... I only have one PATA connector, which supports only 2 devices.