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Well my old motherboard broke so I got myself a 'new' one: ASUS a7n8x-e deluxe. Took out the old board with a friend, put the new board in. Not many jumpers so no worries there, put the radeon back in, put one 512 dimm in A2, the other 512 dimm in B1. Connected an IDE cable to my old harddisk, a WD 80 GB, the one with XP on it, one end in the board, middle in HD, the other end hanging loose. From the secondary IDE slot: another cable, with the dvd-player in the middle, CDRW at the end. Connected the floppy drive.

Now, I have two problems, whether or not they are related I don't know. First of all, the main problem. The damn thing doesn't boot up windows. Primary boot device is set to the WD80. It just goes post, then tells me it cannot boot. It is recognized as the primary master though

Second problem: everything goes slow. I mean, first it's detecting IDE drives, that lasts a full four minutes, then it goes to verify the DMI pool, which lasts another five! Any suggestions?

n99 wrote:Well my old motherboard broke so I got myself a 'new' one: ASUS a7n8x-e deluxe. Took out the old board with a friend, put the new board in. Not many jumpers so no worries there, put the radeon back in, put one 512 dimm in A2, the other 512 dimm in B1. Connected an IDE cable to my old harddisk, a WD 80 GB, the one with XP on it, one end in the board, middle in HD, the other end hanging loose. From the secondary IDE slot: another cable, with the dvd-player in the middle, CDRW at the end. Connected the floppy drive.

If "they haven't changed it" *takes cover* one end of an IDE cable should be the one to put in the mobo, and the other end would be the master, the middle plug should be the slave. I've never heard of a mobo posting that slow tho, and I doubt that it would cause that kinds of problems just connecting a HD wrong. I would try to check for some misplaced jumper, but as I said, I've never really heard of a problem like that before, just try to unplug everything that you don't need to boot (extra memory, cdrw, dvd, floppy etc) and see if that makes a difference...

humm let me test that tomorrow, the ide thing.

That's the same motherboard as me. Does this hard drive boot up on any other computer? The Windows install might have been corrupted. Does it detect your CPU as running at full speed?

I haven't got any other PC to boot that HD up on, but it worked fine before I took it out of the other mobo. CPU at full speed? I think it's an AMD XP 2800+, which is running atr 2 Ghz, that correct?

Sounds right. Do you have any other devices plugged into the motherboard (USB or otherwise) when you try to boot? Are you sure the IDE devices jumpers aren't on 'cable select'?

Edit: What computer are you using now? Didn't you say you had two computers at home?

I'm using my parents p3 500 for aq2, I'm not allowed to rummage around with that one's insides, however.

IDE Cable select, don't even know what that is, I'll have a look in the manual. I can't recall any IDE settings that use jumpers on the board, but I might be mistaken.

I think that Clown means those jumpers in HD, there is like master, slave and cable select.

isnt that like the first u do when installing ur hdd's to check the jumpers.

Yeah but I never touched the jumpers on the HD either since it was the primary master and still is the primary master.

Just check it first..lotso f problems with that....

Connected an IDE cable to my old harddisk, a WD 80 GB, the one with XP on it, one end in the board, middle in HD, the other end hanging loose <-- try to connect the end...(like some said before) solves problems ...

The slow starting... maybe u need to turn on in the bios : quickboot? and check if ur processor is @ the right speed (Said bofore but that was 2 ghz..) and check ur RAM memory config in the bios...i hope i helped u...else contact me @ irc.. (Sulfate @ #wh00s or questionmark)

try fixing your windows install with the windows CD, it might just be the OS that is fuxxed after new motherboard..

Alright, I tried that, wouldn't boot from CD automatically, so I got myself a boot-floppy. That worked, went to the R:\i386, ran winnt.exe

Error during setup, couldn't initialize a swap file.

This probably means that either:

- My harddisk is, although correctly detected, damaged in some way.
- There is something wrong with the IDE cable (not very likely).
- The primary IDE channel on the motherboard is damaged (even less likely, with a brand new board).

- There is still something wrong with the settings in the BIOS.

Last option, most likely. When I go into primary master, I can choose a type or let it pick the type automatically, can't recall all the options now, but they include 'LBA' and 'CHS', what do these abbreviations mean? What should I use if I want to override the automatic setting?

No need to set it to manual .... it shoud work fine on automatic.

But if u want to, set it to LBA (logical block addressing). CHS is not used anymore on newer devices.

Set all to "Automatic", check if jumpers are set correctly as discussed above, try other cables.

If you think your hdd is damaged or you need further help try Data Lifeguard Tools from WD ..this tool helps you to connect and test your hdd. you find it on www.wdc.com

Can that program run from POST?