OMG, I've never been this stumped by a PC

[JiF]Crash · Post by **[JiF]Crash** » Sun Jan 14, 2007 4:37 am

I have a Epox EP-9npa+, which I cannot for the life
of me get to boot from the CDROM or DVD drives. The drives spin up on
boot, the bios autodetects the drives are there, XP is
happy to see, assign a drive letter to, and read them - but the boot
sequence just skips past them as if they're not there at all. The CD
doesn't spin again after the initial power-on reset.

Here are all the things I've tried in the past 24
hours - none of which have worked:

- flashed the mobo to the latest bios, even though it was
already there;
- verified that it boots fine from both the floppy and hard drive,
every time;
- changed the boot device order about 100 times (CDROM first, CD in the
middle, CD last, CD in all three available boot slots, "boot other
devices" on and off, etc)
- tried three different optical drives (CD, CD-RW, and DVD-RW)
- tried all the optical drives on both primary and secondary IDE
connectors, as both master and slave on each one (even tried slaving
off the hard drive), in various combinations of one or two drives on
the same cable
- tried three different ATA cables (both 80 and 40-pin varieties)
- tried to boot innumerable times from the secondary boot menu (ie,
hitting ESC after POST but before the actual boot to get the menu of
devices)
- pulled all other components out of the machine except the boot CD
drive
- tried three different bootable CD/DVDs that are known good

Anyone out there, after reading the
above list, have anything to offer? I'm about to go out and buy the
dead chicken and wave it over the case - otherwise I'm out of ideas.

[JiF]KellysHero · Post by **[JiF]KellysHero** » Sun Jan 14, 2007 5:01 am

Sounds like the motherboard is fubar. Had it been able to boot from a CD/DVD before?

[JiF]Crash · Post by **[JiF]Crash** » Sun Jan 14, 2007 5:14 am

This system has been "fine" for months.
What I did noticed during the summer was that the motherboard would think that I "changed" the boot order for some reason. I would then be presented with F1 to continue booting or DEL to fix the order. This would happen 1/2 the time booting. I usually just pick F1 and it boots XP fine and I go on my merry way. Sometimes I would go in to see the order that it thinks is messed up and find the order fine and wonder why it was complaining. I love epox boards and really stumped on this one. I hate the thought of having to buy another board. I emailed epox and await an answer.

I did clear the cmos and went into the bios and made the bios current, but still no go.

Funny thing is... when it boots with cdrom as first boot dev, it displays the bios real fast, which is fine, then it says BOOT CD -. I've tried leaving it and seeing if it would auto boot the cdrom, and also hitting the enter key to proceed to cdrom boot of XP. nothing. It just boots windows. I've also disabled all dev except for cdrom and when it tries to boot the only dev thats there is fails with an error "DISK BOOT FAILURE: INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.

If in fact I'm porked, what would you all recommend for a system board.

something that likes x64

[JiF][AARP]Grimp · Post by **[JiF][AARP]Grimp** » Sun Jan 14, 2007 3:09 pm

Is the CD the first device on the secondary IDE controller?
If that does not work try making it the secondary device on the primary controller.
Nevermind I just read you whole first post

I would make the cd the secondary master and remove any other optical drives. If it does not work I would try CS on all drives, then if that fails try using the slave master jumpers making sure the drive is on the correct cable position if its an 80 pin cable. That fails swithch the secondary to a 40 pin cable and jump the CD for master.

[JiF]bigjohnson · Post by **[JiF]bigjohnson** » Sun Jan 14, 2007 3:26 pm

force bios to ignore OS plug n play... hard drive might be taking over before spin up.

if you have any drives (card readers, zip, etc. hooked up to the onboard usb, then MB sees these first (found out hard way) so drive assignments don't jive with OS and CD becomes like drive J.

try using only one cdrom first with a stripped down machine (barebones) make sure cdrom is set as master or cable select on the furthest connector on the ata cable (furthest reads first)

other things i ran into were memory timings caused screwy things to happen but that was on old boards. the only other thing is maybe there is something wrong with the cdrom. but this what i've found to work in almost every case even though i procrastinated for up to 8 hours before resorting to it:

check all connections. start out with just MB, ps, video, minimum amount of memory, CDrom, and hard drive. no other components. usually everything works and load xp, then install one thing at a time, this way if something weird happens, then you can usually take it out and restore

[JiF]Crash · Post by **[JiF]Crash** » Sun Jan 14, 2007 5:02 pm

Errr....

Tried all above. Even with cdrom all by itself on IDE1 and it even spind the cdrom for a few seconds. 3 different XP install disks. All I get is boot cdrom
boot cdrom
DISK BOOT FAILURE: INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

I'm going to leave the system for awhile and work off my laptop and see if anyone has more suggestions. I'm also going to give epox a call on Monday and see whats up.

After this I'm going to have to shell out for a new board.

Please, I need suggestions for Nforce4 like boards that like AMD 939, and has pciE for my 7800gt

[JiF]bigjohnson · Post by **[JiF]bigjohnson** » Sun Jan 14, 2007 5:25 pm

sometimes there are some third party drivers required... I once had to save the xp disk to a 1 gb flash drive to get the intial install to work

[JiF]Crash · Post by **[JiF]Crash** » Fri Jan 19, 2007 8:20 pm

Aw right....

Thats the last time I reformat my machine late @ night. After the 5th XP os disk try I come to find out that non are bootable. Found my bootable and all set.

Cya on the battlefield