Reboot problems

My new build was rebooting fine, in fact, I would get a nose bleed it was so fast. Then everything changed when I added a secondary hard drive for storage (it's an IDE connection). Now it hangs forever at the board screen before going into Windows. Does anyone have any idea how I can fix this? My machines specs are:

Thermaltake M9 tower
Coolmax CU-600T 600W ATX Power Supply
ASUS M3A AMD Phenom Socket AM2+ 2000 MHz
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Dual Core Black Edition 2.60 GHz
Thermalright Ultra-90-K8 CPU Cooler
XFX - NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT Graphics Card
OCZ OCZ2P800R22GK 2GB Kit DDR2 PC2-6400 Platinum Revision 2 Dual Channel Memory
Windows XP Home SP2 (couldn't pay me to upgrade to SP3)

 

I suppose since you probably built the system yourself it would be silly to mention checking jumpers huh? I once had problems using two drives set as Cable select instead of Master and Slave and it was really hard to diagnose. Once I figured it out I stopped using CS alltogether and always made sure my main drive was Mastered and on the terminating end of the ribbon and slave in the middle of the ribbon. Also sometimes a new drives jumper legend can be confusing or upside down, its a good idea to look at it carefully and see if the makers could have been more precise with their diagram.

 

I did make sure the SATA is set to master, and the IDE hard drive is set to slave. I ran into the same problem you did years ago and quit using CS. I will double check the diagrams..

My son reminded me that there was an "incident" when this first happened. I was adding the new hard drive, and had to take out the 'bay' that hold the hard drives with a fan attached to it. The wire got scraped, and there was bare wire showing that I didn't notice. Once I had it together (case still open).. I turned it on, and the machine booted up and ran fine. Then I was tucking the wire in, and it hit the frame of the tower. That shut the whole machine down. I repaired the wire, and it booted up fine.. but then this problem started up. Could I have done something then that would be causing this problem?

 

Its possible, but don't even think about that now, if it is the problem, the fix is not going to be a happy moment. After reading your original post again it seems funny to me that you mentioned most of your components but not the hard drives. Also your first post says "I added a secondary hard drive for storage (it's an IDE connection)" yet in this post you say "I did make sure the SATA is set to master, and the IDE hard drive is set to slave".

I had assumed from the first post that both new and old drives were IDE. If your original drive was a Sata and you added the secondary IDE on a ribbon then it would not necessarily be a slave. For one Sata drives do not have master slave jumpers because they each have their own connection. The jumper on a Sata 3gig drive is to set it to Sata 1.5gig if thats all your motherboard can handle (SataII = 3gig/ SataI = 1.5 gig - it has to do with their transfer rates).

If you changed the jumper on a Sata drive just because you can, you probably should put it back. And for the one IDE drive you would set the jumper according to its POSITION on the IDE ribbon. If you plug it to the terminal end of the ribbon its a master if you plug it to the middle its a slave, although I would recommend if you have the hard drive and a dvd-rom drive on the same cable make the HDD master and the rom slave if the cable will stretch that way (its not always possible since rom drives are almost always mounted higher than Hard drives).

If your Sata drive uses a converter so you can plug it into an IDE connector then thats another story altogether.

 

Sorry for the confusion! I didn't meant omit the hard drives from the list of components. I think I got distracted by my little guy and forgot to get back to that. My main drive is a SATA, and the secondary drive is IDE. I will get in there tonight and go through it as you suggested. The SATA is not using a converter, and I'm seriously thinking I need to just replace this IDE hard drive with a SATA at this point. I prefer a rig I can game on and not have to keep working on.

 

Sata drives are faster and not any more expensive than their IDE counterparts. You would still have to determine if your motherboard supports the Sata II standard (3.0) before you decide what to buy. You could also get an external enclosure that would support both sata and ide, and try using your ide drive as an external via usb, and if it didn't work you could always save the enclosure for a sata drive or different IDE later. Of course if the IDE is defective you should/could return it and try another.

There's a good chance that getting the jumper right on the IDE is all you need. Some drives have two master positions 1. Master with Slave and 2. Master alone, or the slave position could be no jumper at all, (usually on these drives there will be a pin by itself so you can save the jumper there without connecting any pins).

Besides looking in the Bios for anything out of the ordinary having to do with the drives priorities (boot order etc.) the jumpers are the place to start. Remember, because the IDE drive is on a different channel than the Sata drive and controlled by a different chipset, it can be a master or a slave depending on its possition on the ribbon and possibly changing its position (and therefore its Master /slave relationship) might effect your systems performance.

 

Well.. you were right. The IDE hard drive had 2 settings for master. I got that fixed, and then powered up the rig, only to have it try to boot from the IDE.. :confused I then got in the BIOS and reset the boot sequence.. and it's all running perfectly again.

Thanks so much for taking the time to teach this newbie a few things!

 

I'm glad you sorted it out without having to buy another drive.