Ok, anyone who can throw me some suggestions here is greatly thanked.
A while back i began haveing issues with a box i had a few large sized HDD's in. Eventually i realized a few compments were going bad and haveing issues (mostly the PSU, IDE cableing, and video card.) So i tore it apart and let it be, untill i decided to rebuild off the motherboard in another case so i could have the spare machine to use the large sized HDDs again.
(Motherboard is acer model AP4400 running an 800mhz SLOT1 PIII with 3x pci and 1x AGP (4x) and 3x ram slots, cant tell you what off the top of my head since i haven't really payed much attention. The ram checked out good on memtest and so forth when i dismantled it around midyear and the slots were maxed, so i haven't bothered them. )
The Mobo came out of a desktop and went into a tower, so the form didn't exactly fit right, so i used the time honored trick of covering the entire bottom of the mobo with ducktape where the mounts didnt exactly match up, but all but two of did and it mounts quite flush.
In the config in the desktop the mobo had been running a Promise ATA 100 controller card with cable select on 4 different HDDs and the cd-r drive. I plugged into the onboard Mobo ide and was getting all kinds of errors, rageing from invaild system disk in the drive to devices on the IDE not registering at all (in the bios autodetection in paticular. It seemed to Be a misshot rather it would or not.) and/or the machine just not booting/shutting down during the bootstrap...i did notice the secondary ide looks like it has a possible pin missing, so maybe thats the issue.
I put back in the IDE controller card (Promise ATA 100 card which can handle some limited raid functionality.) and it all worked fine, besides a 00x7b stop error when the 2k trys to boot to INACESSAIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE 0xf2463848 0xc0000034, then 0 strings.) This error also occurs when setup gets to "starting windows 2000". On bootup, it does display the 2k splash screen.
I came up with a few ideas and have ruled the following out:
-The cd is good
- the cables are good
- cable select made no difference, and nethier did the bios IDE auto detection.
- I have tried two seperate disk drives with the same errors.
At times in different configs the controller card bios will freeze and then just boot with its results (I cant find my notes, so i will look for them and post back when i do locate them.) but most of the time (99%) it goes through the dectection and alerts me of bootable cd just fine and asks me if i want to boot to hdd or cd just fine.
I have tried with single HDD on primary IDE and CD-R drive on secondary. I have given both jumper to single and no jumper with the same result.
I have tried about eight different HDD's at the same point now. All were pulled from various PC's of various working/non-working status and all have 2k and XP loaded, and i am 100% sure they all have ethier of those OSes in some form or another. One of the HDDs gives me a NTLDR not found error, leading me to believe it is a MBR issue perhaps maybe a boot.ini? Even that one (which is running 2k) gives me the 00x7b at the starting 2k in the install, however.
The PSU and cables in the case are all new (Both IDE and molex of course.)
At this point i am down to a few options i am consdering:
1. Trying to open the file structure in another 2k/Xp install to see if i can get to them, maybe format and paration the drives there?
2. IRQ conflicts? Something to look into.
3. Seeing i can get it to boot a linux live cd distro/parts be builder to read/interact with the files and see if the boot.ini and other files exist in the manner, run some disc scans?
Or maybe just the HDDs are all dead (that seems a bit to far flung.) Are the mobo is just biteing the dust at long last...
Any input is greatly thanked before hand. This is a general overview of what i could sum up. If theres a bit of addtional information that might aid someone in thier suggestion i will edit it in as needed. Once again, thanks in advance.
