Motherboard|IDE|XP Problems

[Zacko10000]

Hi,
I haven't been to this fourm for a couple of years .... but what the heck.... it always gave me solid answers, so I'm back!

I've been having some horrible problems with a computer I have been building. It was pieced together from various components --- an old Abit BF6, Pentium III 450, a Voodoo3, and around 300MB of SD RAM I had lying around. I bought a new case, power supply, and IBM 7200RPM 80GB Hard drive for it. I have been having problems with the secondary IDE controller on the motherboard (it flat out doesn't work), and purchased a new ATA/100 card to replace it (its on its way in the mail). My current issue however is with the loading of an operating system. I will format the drive (I have tried both NTFS and FAT32) and XP will install the necessary setup files but upon reboot it will tell me 'error loading operating system' (with NTFS) or 'missing operating system' (with FAT32). I have tried a variety of things to remedy this; trying to create a boot partition of less than 8 GB, adjusting the BIOS settings and other things but none have worked!

My thought would be there might be something wrong with the primary controller as well (and maybe even the floppy controller, eek). The rest of the motherboard appears to work almost flawlessly though so I'm not all that concerned for the moment. Worst case scenerio I suppose I could just buy a new one and a duron.... I'm just curious what your thoughts are on remedying this situation --- one person suggested using a Win98 boot floppy to launch fdisk and set the drive manually active and as the primary partition.

[BipolarBill]

Doesn't the BP6 have an additional Promise IDE controller onboard? If so, you must press F6 during WinNT setup and provide the driver floppy for it. The previous owner may have disabled the standard secondary UDMA33 port in BIOS setup. Try clearing CMOS to reset to factory.

[Zacko10000]

that would probably hold true, except this is a BF6 not a BP6..... I do appreciate your effort though!

[BipolarBill]

Oh well! The card you're waiting for will work just fine. Use the onboard primary for optical drives.

Try clearing CMOS and using Zap on the drive:

http://service.boulder.ibm.com/storage/hddtech/zap.exe