won't boot from hard drive

[jepeters]

I have a Gateway 866 Mhz that was giving me a windows protection error on startup. I decided I would reformat and install a fresh copy of windows to start the new school year.

I was able to format the HD, but when trying to install Win 98, it would lock up on the part where it was checking the system. I took the hard drives out of some of the other GW 866 machines and installed them in this problem machine, but then all I get is a blinking cursor at the top left of the monitor.

I took the original hard drive (which would at least boot to the DOS prompt in this computer) out and put it in another computer of the same model and installed Win2000 with no problem. When I brought the hard drive back to the original machine and try to boot, now I get nothing -- not even the blinking cursor.

If I start the machine with no hard drive, I get an error message saying that no hard drive is present, so the computer is at leats detecting the hard drive when it is installed. Why won't it boot?

[andyms18a]

poss damaged ram do you get any beeps on startup allso the windows protection error on the previos install can be down to ram

[jepeters]

i just connected it to the other IDE controller, and now it's booting just fine. I should have tried that earlier.

[Cricket]

Follow the troubleshooting steps here, it'll help isolate the problem device. I'm guessing it's one of the optical drives.

Cricket

[mike breck]

That suggests your mobo IDE1 controller is faulty.

Does anything else work on IDE1 - like a CD-Rom drive. Is the channel enabled in the BIOS?

If it is shot, you could still extend the life of the mobo by using a PCI ATA66/100 controller card. That would give you an extra two IDE channels for any HDs and you could put your optical devices on IDE2.

[jepeters]

I'm going to look for an IDE cable that is the correct length so I can connect both CD and HD to the remaining controller. If I can't find that, I do have a couple of controller cards laying around that I will install.