Frustrating new system

G'day everyone,

I'm ripping my hair out with this one, and the solution is probably staring at me, BUT.

I bought a new "bare bones box". Case and power supply, with ASRock P4i65GV board, Celeron 2.4 processor and 256 ram. I had the suppliers fit the board and a check of the manual looks like all cabling etc. has been connected correctly.

Now for the problem.

When I install the hard drive, CD and floppy from my currently working computer (P1 100 with W98) the system will boot, BIOS recognises the hard drive and CD, but W98 cannot find the CD.

A lot of new devices exist that I need access to the 98 CD, but can't get there.

I am only running a single IDE cable from IDE1 to connect both CD and hard drive.

The problem also happened when I tried to install "the guts" from another P2 300 system that was running dual boot 98/XP Home. XP really spat the dummy and refused to start - just kept rebooting. 98 tried to start but again couldn't find the CDRom.

Any suggestion gratefully appreciated.

 

I'm a little lost as to exactly where 98 fails to work,if it fails to recognize the cdrom then you might not have a bootable copy of win and will need to make a boot disk,also its best to have the cdrom and harddrive on 2 different channels

 

Rikky... 98 will boot in safe mode.
The ASRock MB has onboard sound and video so I need CD to load these new driver as well as others.
When the new hardware wizard comes up, the option to get to the CD is not highlighted.
Yes I agree that 2 channels is best, but I thought I could solve the problem by only using IDE1...that didn't work.

 

I'll try and refresh my question,have you plugged a harddrive from another computer with the oS already installed on it and it asks for the windows disk,please explain exactly what has happend?

 

Both the P1 and P2 systems work fine in their cases. All I have done is to remove the floppy, hard drive and CDRoms from the old system and fixed them into the new case.

 

Have you double checked the Master/Slave hierarchy of the devices?

(I'm also lost too as to what you mean to be honest)

 

On system boot, hard drive comes up as primary master and CD comes up as primary slave, so I figure that is ok.
When 98 eventually starts (full or safe mode), there is no CD drive listed in my computer/windows explorer.

 

Do you have any other devices on either controllers?

You should always try to keep your hard drives seperate from the optical drives.

In other words, put the CD drive on the Secondary controller and leave the hard drive on the Primary.

Post back with what other drives you have and where if any and check and make sure everything is detected and displayed correctly in the bios.

 

tip

try to reset your BIOS by jumper and reconfig. it again!

 

Insomniac...the only other device is the floppy on it's controller and IDE2 is spare. Originally I had the CD on IDE2 and then switched it to piggy back the hard drive to see if it would solve the problem (which it didn't).

Floppy, CD and hard drive are all detected and show up in bios.

Device manager shows a CD...tonight I deleted it and rebooted in the hope of 98 finding it, but that didn't work.

This is getting really frustrating.

 

Has this drive ever worked properly on this computer?

Is the drive detected and displayed in the Bios, and is it displayed in My Computer and Device Manager?

Double-check the Master/Slave jumper on the back of the drive.

(If you have another computer to check this drive on then that would be a great help)

 

Thanks to all for their suggestions.

I reformatted the hard drivr last night and everything is fine now.