Real Trouble- No Boot Puzzle

[Laser1]

Hi-

I'm a novice builder. Nearly 2 years ago I "built" my own little computer using an Intel Atom 330 MoBo, a Western Digital Green 750 hard drive and a CD/DVD burner. I also later got PCI to Sata controller card to add more hard drives. This has been a great little NAS (no monitor).

On the WD750 drive I had the operating system on one small partition (50 gb) and used the second partition (700gb) for storage. This was plugged directly into the MoBo Sata controller, not my expansion card.

Well, I decided to get cute and repartition the storage part into 2 partitions of 350 gb or so. I went through with it and everything was fine. I successfully wrote to one of the new partitions.

The next day I went to save my daily work and couldn't access the computer. So I hooked it up to a monitor to see what was going on. Now it looks like it won't boot off the hard drive and I couldn't get it to boot of the CD/DVD drive. Text on the screen comes up and says no bootable media or something and sometimes it will say something like really damaged BIOS, going to wing it!

So, now I think I am in real trouble. I went through the Bios to make sure everything was ok, and it seemed to be. And now I am not sure where to begin trouble shooting. I am not sure why if I put in a bootable CD/DVD that the MoBo won't allow me to boot off it? Also, not sure why repartitioning a hard drive would affect my ability to boot off the CD/DVD drive. And I am not sure why repartitioning part of my hard drive would affect the other partition.

Thank you in advance. If this is the wrong place to post, let me know.

 

[o1die]

You can start by removing the board battery for one minute with the system unplugged. This will force a bios reset to the default settings. Then pick only one drive to format or repair. Disconnect the others. See if it will boot up to the wd first when you set the hardrive as the first boot device. If it works, try connecting the optical drive and change the bios boot order to cd>hardrive, save and exit. If windows still won't load, try using safe mode using f6 and see if you can use the "system restore" feature in the security section under "computer>system". As a last resort, you can try downloading western digital software for prepping the drive. If it was a retail box drive, it should have come with a bootable cd to prep the drive. Good luck.

 

[Laser1]

Okay. Great. Thank you. I will start with this. But do you have an idea about why this happened? I know it is hard to know why, but again, i can't understand why repartioning a hard drive would have caused the whole system to go wonky and prevented me from booting off the CD/DVD drive.

 

[o1die]

I can't answer that question. I've had similar unexplainable events in the twenty years I've been building.

 

[Laser1]

Ok. That's what I figured. I will post my progress when I can get back to the machine later.
Thank you.

 

[Laser1]

Okay-

I tried to remove the battery but that didn't help. Then in the process of unplugging all the other drives, save for the WD drive, I thought that maybe the reason the CD/DVD drive wasn't being seen was because it was plugged into the PCI to Sata card, and not directly into MoBo. So I reconnected CD/DVD drive directly to the MoBo, restarted with OS disk in CD/DVD the drive and it was recognized! Somehow, my original boot drive wasn't being seen as a boot option. So I was able to repair with OS disk...I think the boot partition was not active and was reactivated.

All's well that ends well.

Thank you for the help o1die.

 

[Laser1]

Best answer selected by Laser1.