P3 Boot problems - sorted (sort of)

Nigel — Mon Oct 31, 2005 2:58 pm

Author: Nigel

Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005 2:58 pm

Update
Seems like the problem is having two optical drives on the same IDE controller - it works fine if I unplug either of them.
But they are definitely correctly jumpered.

I tried all sorts of possible configurations, and finally got the following to work:

IDE Primary Master - 4Gb Seagate HDD
IDE Primary Slave - Panasonic CD-ROM
IDE Secondary Master - Samsung CD-RW
IDE Secondary Slave - 10Gb Samsung HDD

The BIOS still didn't autodetect the CD-ROM, but when I manually set it as a CD-ROM it then worked OK, including allowing me to boot from it. It isn't an ideal setup, but it will do for this machine.

In case anyone cares, the mobo is a Fujitsu-Siemens D1170 that started life in an RM machine and the CD-ROM is a Panasonic CR-583-B.

Wierd...

P3 Boot problems

Nigel — Thu Oct 27, 2005 3:09 pm

Author: Nigel

Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2005 3:09 pm

Here's a strange one...

I have an old P3 machine that dual-boots Win2000 & Fedora Core 3. I intend to replace Fedora with Ubuntu sometime soon.
All has been working fine until this morning, when I added a second CD-ROM drive. Now it has problems booting.

Hardware before the change :
P3-677MHz
512Mb memory
IDE Primary Master - 4Gb Seagate HDD
IDE Primary Slave - 10Gb Samsung HDD
IDE Secondary Master - Samsung CD-RW

The change I made was to make the Samsung CD-RW into the Secondary Slave, and add a Panasonic CD-ROM as Secondary Master.

When I boot the machine, it detects all the hardware fine, but then just hangs with a blank screen (apart from the cursor in the top left corner).
If I hit F12 during the POST phase to bring up the boot menu, that comes up but it still hangs when I select boot from Hard Disk.

HOWEVER, if I boot with the Ubuntu live CD in the CD-ROM drive, it boots into Ubuntu fine.
If I boot with the Ubuntu live CD in the CD-ROM drive and hit F12 during the POST, then select Boot from Hard Disk when the boot menu appears, Grub starts up & gives me the correct choices (Win2k or Fedora), and either will boot fine.

I vaguely recall reading something ages ago about boot problems on some mobos/bioses if all 4 IDE devices were present, but I can't find any reference to this now.

Anyone got any ideas/suggestions ?

Many thanks,

Nigel.

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P3 Boot problems - sorted (sort of)

P3 Boot problems