New drive not booting

[SleeperSeal]

Ive got a weird problem here and i cant figure it out. Im rebuilding one of my friends compaqs, its a 5000 persario. His motherboard capacitors are flakey so i put in a spare PCchips Socket A m805lr i had.

It powered up and boots fine off the cd-rom. The bios sees his recently newly installed Seagate 120Gb drive (installed and worked fine about 2 weeks before the new motherboard)

It wont boot off the Seagate. So i thought maybe the masterboot record was messed up. I used the recovery console and reinstalled the MBR. Didnt help... So i tried a smaller drive with XP on it (40GB Western Dig) and it booted off that drive...

So this motherboard must not like this Seagate's boot sector. It writes to the drive fine, i tried to load another copy of XP but it wouldnt get past the pre-copy phase since it cant boot off it... Both the BIOS and windows installation see the disk fine as a 120GB... I flashed the bios to a 5 month newer version (dec 2000), didnt help...

How can i get this drive to work with this motherboard???

Thanks guys, Andy

 

[PCcashCow]

Is that Seagate a Sata drive or IDE?

 

[SleeperSeal]

dah i knew i forgot to add somethign..

Its an IDE drive. The motherboard is a PCchips m805LR socket A with SD ram... Bit of an older board... I also noticed the motherboard is running the IDe interface at aTA66... Im pretty sure that board can do ATA100 but thats not a big deal right now...

I have another 120GB ide drive... im gonig to format it and install windows to see if maybe there really is something wrong with the 120GB seagate... Its just weird the drive works but not the boot sector...

thanks for your interest cow!

 

[PCcashCow]

I know it doesn't make any sense but the Bios is disagreeing with that drive for some reason. Be sure the jumpers on that drive are correct. Also, is anything else slaved to the drive?

You may need to also check that the boot order is sticking in the bios, if its not holding then who know where the bios is looking for the MBR.

 

[SleeperSeal]

jumpers check out fine, set to master... no other drives on the channel.. I switched to cable select just for fun, no effect... Bios boot order is fine... Im going to back up the drive and repartition/format it and see what that does...