New Box won't Boot From Floppy... HELP!!!

[davecb]

Hey all...

I've been building a new system from scratch to replace my old, clunky, noisy, crappy, slow (I could go on) system. Before I get to my problem, here's the hardware inside-

Abit BE6-II V2.0 Motherboard
Pentium III 800mhz (100mhz bus)
256 mb pc100 sdram
Elsa Gladiac 32mb Video Card
HP 9150i CD-RW Drive
IBM Deskstar 75GXP 45gb Ultra-DMA 100 HD
3.5 inch Mitsumi Floppy Drive

So I have everything installed properly (I think) and the system seems to find it all and boot as it should. Where I'm running into trouble is I can't get it to boot from the boot disk floppy for my Win 98 S.E. full version. My first thought was the BIOS but I checked that and it has Floppy as first boot device and the HD as second.

The first time I tried and failed, the floppy light never turned off after I started the machine and it gave me: "BOOT DISK FAILURE, PLEASE INSERT A DISK AND PRESS ENTER"

So I opened it back up, turned the floppy cable over (the end going into the drive) and tried again. This time it seemed to read the floppy but then said: "Disk I/O Error"

Does anybody know what's going on here?

[mairving]

Dave,

1. First thing that I would try is to make sure that pin 1 on your floppy lines up with the pink edge of the cable. If the light on the floppy drive is always on, then the cable is backwards.
2. Then I would make sure that the floppy that you have is bootable. Try it in another machine to make sure.
   
3. If both of those fail, then I would try another floppy drive.
   

If all of those fail and it is set to boot off of the floppy first, then you more than likely have a bad FD controller on the MB.

[davecb]

Hmm, okay... I'm thinking it's possible that the floppy connector might be off by a pin or two to one side. I wasn't really working in that great a light when I installed the floppy. Here's hoping...

Is a motherboard having a bad FD connector a common problem? I'm hoping that's not the problem... Mounting that thing was a pain in my arse!!

Thanks again though. I'll try what you suggested and if it still doesn't work, I'll be back here again.

[mairving]

Motherboard with a bad FD connector is rare but it is a possibility. I think I hate attached & detaching those ribbons cables the worst too.

[davecb]

Yeah, those are a severe pain. So many cables to connect.

Of course what made the installation such a pain was that I've never built a system from scratch before. I usually just get barebones boxes and transfer my old hardware. So I found myself having to do everything really slowly and carefully to make sure it was right.

But anyways, it's good to at least know a bad FD connector is rare. I've got a couple more hours to go here at work but I'll try your suggestions this evening.

Mucho gracias!

[MadMax]

The end closest to the twist should go to the floppy drive.
Pin 1 is usually on the same side as the power connection.

[davecb]

Well, I get past one problem and up spurts another... As I said in my previous post, here's the hardware of my new box:

Abit BE6-II v2.0 Motherboard
Pentium III 800mhz
256mb pc100 sdram
IBM Deskstar 75gxp 45gb ultra-dma 100 HD
Elsa Gladiac 32mb vid card
3.5 inch Mitsumi Floppy Drive
HP 9150i CD-RW Drive
Kingston Ethernet Card

The problem I'm having is I simply cannot get a sound card to work. I tried my new card first - an SB Live mp3+ - and not only does it have the same IRQ as my Network Controller but if I leave it in, after I set it all up, Windows finds it, etc., everytime I start Windows it prompts with the "Restart to Complete Installation".

So I'm thinking okay, maybe it's just the card. No biggie. I try my old Sound Blaster 16 PnP card and the same thing happened.

Anybody with a BE6-II v2.0 mobo who's having/had the same problems???

[lynchmob]

Please dont be offended by my question, but, does the mobo have onboard sound and was it disabled?
BTW, what did you do to fix floppy?
Hope things start working better for you.
lynch

[mairving]

This motherboard does not have onboard audio. I had a lot of problems with this board. I was finally able to get the board to work by disabling the ATA66, Hot Rod Controller.

Here are the IRQ assignments for the board:

• PCI slot 1 shares signals with the AGP slot.
  
• PCI slot 2 shares signals with PCI slot 5.
  
• PCI slot 3 shares signals with the HPT366 IDE controller.
  
• PCI slot 4 does not share signals with anything
  
• PCI slot 5 and HPT 366 use the same bus master signals. Therefore if HPT366 is enabled, you can't install a PCI card that will occupy the bus master signals into PCI slot 5.
  

Then you have the USB port to worry about also. Supposedly the HPT366 controller will share an IRQ with another in 3. Some things don't like to share. The SB is one of them. I would put the SB in slot 4 (start counting from the AGP slot). You may be able to stick the network card in 2. I would try those assignments. Do you have any other devices to stick in there? If it doesn't work, you may consider disabling the HPT366 (future ATA in the BIOS). You will lose some performance but the system will work. Keep us posted on your progress.

[kraken]

four letters

ACPI

[mairving]

I tried that on mine. No difference.

[kraken]

Full ACPI requires the hardware and the software to comply.

WinSE? WinME, Win2000 comply on the software side, the hardware is another story.

I would love to be rid of IRQ conflicts for good, but my hardware doesn't support this. I can get the software anytime (Shhhhh).

ACPI remove the IRQ limitations from systems, for that it has to be useful.

[AndyM]

Dave,
I just shipped back a BE6-II v2.0 yesterday. My prob was the optical mouse light stayed on when the sytem was shutdown. I won't get another replacement board for about 10 days. But, I had a SB Live Experince in PCI 2 and a 3com NIC in PCI 4, with success. I installed in the order of Matrox G400, then NIC, then SB. I did have conflicts when using Liveware download (I think version 3.0). It pretty well froze things up. I stuck with drivers from the Creative CD. Good luck.

[davecb]

Hrm, well, I ended up installing the NIC card into PCI slot 2 so I could get my DSL up and running. That worked like a charm with little or no trouble.

When I tried to install the SB Live, I tried two different slots. One happened to be PCI 3 (which shares) and the other was PCI 5 (which also shares). Guess I wanted it either on the end or smack in the middle. Picky I know.

I'm going to try putting the SB Live in slot 4 tonight. I'm hoping it works... I need sound!!!

Oh and another thing.... any idea why the Power and HD lights on the front don't seem to do anything? I have them connected to the board but to no avail.

[AndyM]

Reverse the polarity (or turn over) Power and HD LED connectors at mobo.

[davecb]

Hmm...sound simple enough. Right now the writing on the power and hd led connectors is facing towards the bottom of the box. I should make them face the top of the box?

[AndyM]

Yea...you wouldn't think you'd have a mix of some down and some up but I did...just make sure you have the proper pins identified.

[mairving]

Reversing the connectors will not change anything. The switch has no polarity so it makes no difference. If you had them on the wrong pin, that could hurt. It is really just a matter of plugging away like you are doing.

[davecb]

*sigh*

Well I plugged them all in the first time and realized I had the power switch and hdd-led plugs on the wrong pins. I quickly fixed that so that the power switch turned on (I was worried for a minte...) and the hdd-led is on the right pins but like I said, neither the hdd or power leds work.

Any thoughts on this?

[davecb]

Well, assuming I have no further problems with getting my sound card configured, I do have another thing I'm wondering about...

I've got an Ultra-DMA capable HD in my old computer that is partitioned into four drives (c, d, e, f) with a lot of irreplacable data on it. With the motherboard I'm using, I want to put in the drive as a slave to the primary ultra-dma HD, go into Windows, have it recognize the drive, copy over all the files I need, then turn the machine off, remove the second (slave) hd, restart the computer, and have it back to normal. Is this possible?

My concerns are about a) the CD-RW drive letter getting shifted up and not back down after I remove the slave (old HD) drive and b) the machine somehow booting off the slave HD rather than the primary HD. Are these concerns valid or just raging paranoia?

[glc]

If you have a good working 98SE on the old computer - here is what I would do:

Download Drive Guide from http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/welcome.htm . Install the new drive as primary master and the old drive as primary slave. Boot with the Drive Guide disk and use it to set up your new drive's partitions. You then can have it copy the old drive's partitions to the new drive's partitions.

Shut down and pull the old drive. Boot the machine into SAFE MODE and completely empty Device Manager. Remove *everything* that can be removed. Restart and Windows will redetect all the hardware from scratch - if it doesn't, just help it a bit with the Add New Hardware wizard.

You would be strongly advised to copy the Windows cab files and all your drivers for all existing and new equipment onto the old hard drive before removing it from the old machine. That way, when it's detecting hardware and asks for the Windows or a driver CD, you can point it to the hard drive - because your IDE controllers won't be working till you reboot a few times - and that will prevent CD access.

I would also recommend that you fire up the new box and do the drive cloning with ONLY the CPU, ram, video card, hard drives, and floppy drive installed and connected. You can introduce the other components one at a time after the basic setup is working.

[AndyM]

Check your manual on the LED's, according to the manuals on 2 different Abit boards we have: the LED's must be sensitive to direction of current flow. Just rotate 'em and stick 'em back on.

[davecb]

Whoo Hoo is what sums it all up.

Thanks mairving and Andy... I finally got everything on my system working. I ended up looking at the Motherboard's manual a little more closely and found out what the hardware device in question was on my system's profile. It was listed as "PCI Mass Storage Device". I followed what the book said, which included installing some drivers (like you suggested Andy) and after I did that, I tried the SB Live in slot 4 (like you said mairving) and wah-lah. It worked!

Andy: I also turned the power and hdd led connectors around and that worked like a charm. Thanks dude.

Thanks to both of you guys and everybody else who offered some advice. My new PC is complete and it kicks ass!

[AndyM]

You're welcome! It is rare that I get to help in these boards due to the caliber of the company we keep around here but...I just finished going through all those problems myself.
Building these things reminds me of when I was a kid building model cars, only these have a character of almost being alive (one slip and you kill them!...or at least blow up a couple of hundred bucks!) Glad to hear you're rockin'.

[davecb]

Well, I spent my first weekend with the new box, played some openGL Quake 2 at 640x480 (60fps), enjoyed some good ol' emus, listened to a hundred+ mp3 playlist, and just enjoyed the ride. I only ran into one annoying problem.

As per my friend's suggestion, I updated my Internet Explorer to 5.5 but now IE likes to randomly crash. You know of any funky bugs in IE 5.5 and any fixes for those?

Figures my sweet, sweet victory had to be poo-pood on by Gates'.