Installed Win98SE then computer hangs at boot

[Will Rickards WT]

Weird thing happened.
I disconnected all my drives except for dvd drive and hard drive. The western digital was alone on its cable on an Promise Ultra33. I put it on the onboard controller.

Couldn't find a 98 boot disk, so I broke out win2kpro.
Created two partitions during setup, 2048 and one for the rest 77??.
Installed win2k to the second partition, but it formatted the first one two for me. Win2k boots I set it up. Get on the internet and download a 98SE bootdisk.

Boot off the bootdisk and install windows 98 to the first partition.
Setup wants to restart so I take the floppy out and restart.
Computer hangs right after the Ultra33 bios screen.
So I remove the Ultra33.
Computer hangs right after detecting the IDE devices (which it detects fine) which is the screen before the Ultra33 bios screen.
BIOS goes no further to the normal table that shows me which banks the ram is in and what mode my drives are using and all that. Nor to the screen that shows me which IRQs my devices are using.

So I try cold booting, resetting bios to defaults, more cold booting.
No go.
So I start unplugging drives and start with the hard drive.
Bingo boots up.
Unfortunately, the hard drive is what I need.

So I didn't go any further because it was getting late but thought you guys might have some clue. Maybe I'll go home, hook the hard drive back up and it will work?

 

[blakerwry]

have you tried removing/ disabling hardware... onboard sound, NIC, USB and anything in a PCI slot come to mind...

 

[P5-133XL]

*** most likely problem - Check to se if the WD is jumpered as a "single" drive (not master or slave).

Use onboard ide rather than promise card (pull Promise card)

Pull all cards other than a single video card (use the onboard video or a card but make sure only one is active). Disable all non-essential MB HW like SCSI, raid, serial, parallel, USB, Firewire, ...

replace the IDE cable.

When you get it to boot with HD then start adding stuff back (one item at a time). When it fails, you will then have an idea of what your problem was.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

The jumper did look funky (horizontal) but it probably needed to be that way on the promise card. I'll pull the hard drive out and check the jumper tonight.

I can't believe it is a conflict with anything since it all worked together without error for years now. And in its current configuration, it has been at least 6 months.


Was it you blakerwry that asked for my Ultra33 when I was done with it a while ago? Well I am just now getting to installing the new controller card.

 

[Jan Kivar]

Win9x must be installed prior to installation of Win2k/XP. Not the other way around. IIRC I got the same symptoms with my older system, as I installed both WinXP and Win98SE to it. I too had to install XP first, as I had lost all my boot disks. Later on I tried to install Win98SE, but the setup hung just like yours at some point. I even tried to play around with the boot sectors and the different versions of the boot files, but no go. Only way to get it booting anything was to start from the XP CD and use the recovery console to restore the MBR. At this point I was able to get into XP again.

After playing around a bit I just formatted the two partitions from the recovery console, and installed Win98SE first. No probs then...

Cheers,

Jan

 

[blakerwry]

Aren't your guy's win98 CD's bootable?

 

[Howell]

The jumper did look funky (horizontal) but it probably needed to be that way on the promise card. I'll pull the hard drive out and check the jumper tonight.

Some hard drive makers use the same jumper setting for master and stand-alone. Most of them actually iirc.

WD is not one of these. They ship the dirve in stand-alone setting (no jumper) but since the expect you to need the jumper later the place in an innocuous position (horizontal). No that this info helps you with your current problem.

 

[Buck]

The jumper did look funky (horizontal) but it probably needed to be that way on the promise card. I'll pull the hard drive out and check the jumper tonight.

Some hard drive makers use the same jumper setting for master and stand-alone. Most of them actually iirc.

WD is not one of these. They ship the dirve in stand-alone setting (no jumper) but since the expect you to need the jumper later the place in an innocuous position (horizontal). No that this info helps you with your current problem.

Most new WD drives are coming jumpered on pins 1 and 2, which is Cable Select. Most OEMs, especially WD's biggest customer, DELL, uses Cable Select.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

Primary Master Hard Disk Failed

The problems varies from no hard drive detected to the drive detected but failing as above to just hanging.

I've tried all the jumper settings. no jumper, single setting (horizontal), master, slave, cable select. I tried a different jumper.
I tried both cable positions.
I tried two different cables, one 80pin & one 40pin.
I tried two different power connectors.

Practically every combination of the above.
Cold booting then warm booting.

I think it just died during the restart somehow.

It seems to make the normal startup sound (click - whir).
And it seems to be spinning when I hold it in my hand.
It might be clanking as when I hold it, it seems to jump every so often.

I don't need the drive, I was just going to use it to benchmark my new maxtor 120GB. And the system boots fine from the 30GB 75GXP drive.

Just seems weird that I was using it one minute, restart and it is dead?

 

[Will Rickards WT]

Oh and yes I pulled all the cards except video.