Hi, i'm wondering if anyone can think of anything this could be before I go out and get a pci controler.

I bought the above as a motherboard / cpu bundle on ebay with the intent of upgrading my firewall.

Everything came well packed and after taking all the usual pracortions, once it was in a case it ran a ubuntu live cd well - just so that I could let the seller kno it was working.

To cut a long story short, another box failed so it ended up as a replacement with xp on it.
The install would go fine, the os would load and i'd install drivers and reboot.
However at this point, I get a disk read error (Can quoat the exact if anyone wants) saying that it couldn't find the hdd or words to that effect.
Bit strange, so I reinstall, this time doing a full format instead of ntfs quick and with out installing any drivers, I rebooted and get the same message.
Old drive comes out replaced with a newer one and a different cable, same result.
Boot into ubuntu from cd, reading of the drive works fine.

Tryed removing the cd rom and putting the hdd on that controler, same problem.

All I can think of now is the controler going bad, but at first I ruled this out since writing was obveously fine for the xp install to have loaded the first time and readings obveously fine as I could get at the drive in ubuntu.

I'm hoping its some bios setting that the last owners played with as this case is cramped enough with out having to fit a pci ide controler in there.

As always I really like getting pointers even if its not a direct solution - I learn more that way me thinks.
Chears for looking.

It sure doesn't sound like a controller problem.

The system works ok until you install drivers?

Which drivers are these, and what is the exact error message.

Have you disconnected any external devices?

Swap the IDE (Pri/Sec) or even better, skip the Pri & hook the optical drive & HDD on the same controller, then try the installation again.

Hi - thanks for the replies.

In order:
Yeah it worked fine untill I installed the sound driver that I got from the ecs site. I'm reinstalling atm and i'll try a few reboots with out any drivers to see if thats the problem.
Message is "disk read error, please insert system disk and press any key" and then if theres a cd in there it'll boot from that. (I'll point out here that the boot order is what it should be - cd - hdd)
The only things that were connected was a keyboard and for part of it a screen.
If non of the suggestions work I will put the drive and the cd on the same controler but i'll have to swap cases as due to the layout in the current one the cd and hdd are placed in a way that means you can't use one kable.

Thanks again for the replies.

If the drive is on a SATA controller, you could try a setting in the bios to have it run in IDE (PATA) mode.

What size is the harddrive? Could be a 48bit LBA compliance issue.

http://www.48bitlba.com/index.htm

Na its ide. sorry.

Thanks for the link but the first one was a 80 and the 2nd one is a 40.
Xp just finished installing - after a reboot I still get the disk error.

Have you tried rebooting without installing any drivers?

Is it going through the whole install without a single error?

Yeah it finished installing with out any drivers and after a reboot it still errored.
Yeah its a normal xp install with nothing added except its unattended and theres no errors.

Is that 'unattended' built into the CD?
Can you run it without the unattended?
Is it a modified legit Microsoft CD?
Something is sure weird!

Its a image of a legit ms cd with the unattended bit added because i'm blind.

I am really impressed that you can work on the hardware without any vision.
I wish I could come up with an answer, but I'm pretty much at a loss. The only thing I can think of to try, is changing the boot sequence to put the hard drive first. But I really don't see how that could cause the problem. Hopefully we have somebody out there that will pop in with some ideas.

OK, last thing first. You may not be aware but if you are using an 80 wire cable and use Master/slave settings you can connect either drive to either connector. Except of course the connector that must go to the MBoard. It sounds like the harddrive may not be in the boot order. I know you said it was but it should be HDD0. Another thing to check is to verify that the BIOS is set to allow the OS to configure the hardware. ACPI or PnP aware OS is what you are looking for.

OtheHill brings up a good point - the proper connector must be connected to the mboard header on an 80 wire cable - usually it's blue, and in any case it's the one farthest from the middle connector on a three connector cable.
Also, your drive may not be detected properly if it is connected to a 40 wire data cable rather than an 80 wire one

Apparently this is a socket A mboard with one Primary and one Secondary IDE header on it, and no SATA controllers/headers.

Manual here if you don't have it:
http://www.ecsusa.com/ECSWebSite/Pr...
There's info about the bios Setup settings in that.

"disk read error, please insert system disk and press any key"

Similar to what OtheHill said.....
Your symptoms sound like the bios is finding the hard drives fine but it is not finding a bootable drive.

"disk read error" may not be the bios actually finding problems reading the drive - it may be just be part of a poorly worded statement that means it isn't finding a bootable drive.

Windows Setup does not require the bios finds a bootable hard drive - Windows Setup will proceed fine until Setup has finished.
When you boot from a ubuntu CD, you're not booting from the hard drive.

Go into the bios Setup.

If you are overclocking the mboard, set settings to defaults for the time being, save settings.

If you're not sure whether someone has screwed up settings in the bios, Load Fail Safe Defaults, save settings

Advanced Bios Features

Boot Device order

According to your manual it appears the hard drives are listed according to how they are connected to the mboard and how the drives are jumpered - e.g. Master on Primary IDE is HDD-0.
( I never use CS jumpering - if you use that, Slave is the drive on the middle connector, master is the drive on the end connector opposite the mboard end)
If that setting is set to a HDD connection to a drive that is not bootable, the bios will not find a bootable hard drive.
In theory if you have only one hard drive connected, the bios should automatically find the bootable hard drive, but maybe it won't if it is set wrong, or if you don't have the bootable drive connected to Primary IDE as master that defaults may expect.
Make sure the HDD-x is correct, where x is the number of it's connection.

If you have two or more hard drives connected, it is often the case the first hard drive listed must be bootable - if it isn't the bios will not check other hard drive connections to see if they have bootable drive if they are not listed, and some bioses will not check other hard drives after the first one to see if they are bootable even if they are listed.
Some bioses have a separate list of hard drives - the first hard drive in that list often must be bootable for the same reason.

What are the model numbers of the drives?

Tubes: "( I never use CS jumpering"

i thought these days that that was the standard to use. Well, i mean Scott Mueller suggests to do so >>>>> if you are using 2 80 wire Cable Select cables, then set ALL devices (HDDs and Opticals) to CS jumper. Having done that, connect the 2, 3 or 4 devices on those 2 cables and the cable itself will determine which is Master and which is Slave on a particular CS cable, according to where the device is connected on that cable >>>>> the HDD with CS jumper setting connected to the end connector (the black one) will be recognised by the cable and it will give it Master status, and so on with a Slave device connected to the middle grey connector. With a CS jumper setting, just plonk the ones you want as master on the end black and the slaves in the middle.

i've recently purchased 2 IDE connectable devices in the past 2 months and they arrived with factory jumper setting of CS >>>> ready to plonk ona 80 wire CS cable.

regards

.
Central Coast NSW Aussie

There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

Hi
bmustillrose
have you tried install xp with the on board sound disabled in the bios?

& v long shot: ACPI 1.0, also in bios try an install with acpi disabled as well, if theres no option for acpi to be disabled what other options are available try setting 2.

litany of T&W "I never use CS jumpering"

heehee

How many total IDE devices are we talking about here? If it's a single HDD & single optical drive, the HDD should be Primary Master & the optical should be 2ndary Master. If you're running more IDE devices than that, it's generally best NOT to pair up two HDDs or two optical drives on the same cable/channel.

I almost never use CS jumpering either. IMO the big disadvantage is that you MUST put the master on the end connector & that doesn't always work well when putting a HDD & optical drive on the same cable.

Hi - thanks for the replies.

Chears aegis - practice makes perfect I spose but its really satisfying when I do a build and it turns on and then I config it my self.
Thanks for trying to help.
OtheHill, each drive is on its own cable and there the style that has one port for the mobo and another port for the drive. I used to use the cables that let you put more than one device on it using cs but because I have kno way of beeing able to tell how the drives are jumpered when I get them, this usually failed and I had a box full of the other type of cables so I just tend to use those. Is that what you meant?
I'll play with the boot order, but I thought that after the first reboot in the xp setup it actually booted from the drive and called files from the cd when it needed it?
I'll have a nose around in the bios when someone can read me stuff.
Tubesandwires chears for digging out the manual - I had to dl it anyway because I needed to kno what pins did what but nvm.
"it may be just be part of a poorly worded
statement that means it isn't finding a bootable drive." True - it is ecs after all.
" When you boot from a ubuntu CD, you're not booting from the hard
drive." er yeah sounds fairly logical to me. The only reasons that I booted to ubuntu was first to make sure the cpu ram and mobo were working fine and were the ones that I bought and 2nd so I could try and read from the hdd to see if the controler would let me do that.
Yeah I tryed fail safe defaults and it didn't do anything, same with optimum but its on fail safe now.
Its only a simple build really - nothing fancy atm and when i've done things like this before its worked out alright - pot luck maybe.
DAVEINCAPS current drive = WDC WD400BB-00FJA0 - I kno its only a 5400 but all I intended for it to do was run ipcop and I don't even cache that much so it doesn't need to be that fast.
1stepbeyond, i'd really rather not disable onboard sound, I mean by default xp doesn't find a driver so it doesn't even see its sound - just a multi media controler. If all else fails then i'll disable it.

I've actually emailed the seller and mensioned that I may have to return it - I was just wondering if anyone could think of anything I was doing wrong before I blaimed the seller.

Chears.

Yeah its just one hdd and one cd.
The case is really quite matx, so the cd drive is actually fitted vertically. Because of the layout its kinda not possible to twist a single cable to get to the hdd and the cd rom.

Bmustillrose, as mentioned above, it almost has to be a problem with the boot sequence in the bios. The drive is obviously working ok because the install went fine. Booting from it seems to be the only problem. Somehow the hard drive must have been dropped out of the boot sequence.

Yes, it's true new drives often come jumpered CS these days, but there have been too many times when I have not been able to physically connect two drive connectors to two drives on the same three connector data cable properly without having to physically move or flip a drive that was already installed to get the master and slave arrangement I wanted to achieve. In most cases I can use master and slave jumpering instead and not have to do that.
.......

""it may be just be part of a poorly worded
statement that means it isn't finding a bootable drive.""
" True - it is ecs after all."

Many ECS mboards are actually made by Hsing Tech, who also sell their mboards retail as PCChips models, and sell them OEM and wholesale to other vendors including ECS who sell them retail using the vendors model number. The manuals and bios versions are often identical to those of PCChips models, although somtimes ECS has been known to make their own manual for a model.
The quality of Hsing Tech mboards varies from crap to as good as or better than similar mboards. The one thing they are well known to be more likely to have is the cheapest possible bios flash chips they could get at the time the mboard was made - they are more likely to physically fail when you attempt to flash the bios.
Hsing Tech mboards never have the model printed on the surface of the mboard, but they always have a version (e.g. V.1.1 or Ver.1.1) or a revision (e.g. R 1.1 or Rev 1.1) printed on them. Vendors may sometimes have placed stuck on labels on the mboard on the top or the back/bottom side that have their own model on them, or that are a inventory or date related or similar labelling not directly related toi the model number. They also often have chips that have been renamed to Hsing Tech's specs, e.g. C-Media sound chips renamed to SoundPro or similar.

The jumpers on western digital drives can sometimes be confusing. If you're not using Cable Select then for a single drive on the cable the correct setting 'no jumper'. It's only when you have a second hard drive on the cable that you need to jumper the first one as 'master'.

My experience has been that when a single WD drive is incorrectly jumpered as master the HD bios detection will hang for 5 or 10 seconds and then may or may not detect the drive. It doesn't sound like that's the problem here since the OS does initially install but you might want to verify the jumpers are correct.