I just purchased a new HDD and a DVD-RW, the first for backups and the second to replace a drive I broke. With that done I wanted to format and reinstall the OS. So, reboot the computer, go into the BIOS, change the boot sequence… and it doesn’t work.
Whenever I set it to boot from the DVD my computer would just reset after the POST sequence. Worse, after two or three reboots as I tried to get a handle on the problem the POST sequence got messed up somehow. It seemed to hang for a couple of seconds between beeps where it used to just be like “beep, beep”.
I could still access the BIOS and when I changed to sequence to boot from my old XP drive it worked fine but something is clearly wrong. I’ve also had issues where my computer just hangs and shows a black screen in the middle of everyday tasks at intervals ranging from weeks to days so I’m concerned that this is my motherboard dying in front of my eyes.
The only other thing I can think of is to switch the SATA connector to the new DVD so that it’s not using the same connector as the old, broken one.
it’s not as simple as switching around hds unfortunately since windows refers to settings laid out in the boot.ini (depending on what OS version you have) file.
Everything works fine in windows, the drives get detected in POST, all that crap works.
And I was not going to switch out drives, I installed a new HDD for backups and I was planning on wiping my old OS install and reinstalling on the old drive. But I did not even get that far because to do that I have to be able to boot from my windows disk and when I set the DVD as the bootable drive the computer just resets after POST.
OS isn’t even relevant as it fails before the OS has a chance to load.
Heh, at this point I’m afraid to even restart my computer out of fear that it won’t start again. Probably irrational but messing in the BIOS while it’s acting flaky is not something I feel confidant about doing, even if it’s nothing I haven’t done before.
