went to add a hard drive and now my computer won't boot

[wbrwn766]

my computer is a custom built computer so there is no make as such but the motherboard is a Ecs Elitegroup 755-a2 rev.1 with 1 sata hard drive (slave) and 1 ide (master with 3 partitions win 8, blank, win 7) and 2 DVD drives and 1 old CD drive and 1 floppy drive. i don't know the drive letters.

i tried to add another ide hard drive with win XP on it to wipe and use on my system.
i had no more ide slots so i removed the old CD drive and add the (old) new hard drive in it's place as a slave.

went to start up and ntldr is missing
i tried to do a win 7 system repair from CD (in 1 of the DVD drives) the CD won't boot.
i thought that boot from CD was disabled but cannot access BIOS to find out.

can anyone help.
i am willing to try anything.
i do not want to spend money on this problem if i can help it.

thanks

 

[KenB]

Hi and welcome to FpcH

Remove the SATA drive connection from the motherboard and disconnect the power to it.

Take the XP drive out completely.

Disconnect the DVD drives' data cables from the motherboard and unplug the power connections.

You should have ONLY the hard drive that has Win 8 / Win 7 on it connected.

Try booting up now.

What is the response ?

 

[wbrwn766]

the system booted in to a auto repair seems to be working fine!!
using it to reply

how do i get the other hard drives to work?
could i try them one at a time and see what one is causing the problem?
or is there a better way?

 

[KenB]

could i try them one at a time and see what one is causing the problem?

You are reading my mind

Connect up the DVDs first - boot up.

Then put the SATA drive back .........boot up.

If all is OK to here ..... check the XP drive.
The jumper should not be set to "Master" - make it "Slave"

 

[wbrwn766]

SATA drive & 1 DVD drive working (played a DVD and can access docs on SATA)
but one DVD drive is not showing up in "My Computer"
why would this be

could this be the problem

have not tried XP drive yet

 

[RandyL]

i tried to add another ide hard drive with win XP on it

That will probably cause a problem.

A hard drive with an OS on it will likely be an issue as XP should be installed not just put on with the drive.

 

[KenB]

could this be the problem

Unlikely - unless you had a non-bootable disk in the drive..
NTLDR missing is to do with the boot.ini file / trying to boot from a non-bootable device etc.

If the machine was trying to boot from the XP Drive you would get this.

 

[wbrwn766]

could i try installing the XP drive
then doing a XP system repair
then a 7 repair if the boot.ini file is missing
or would this cause more problems

if so does anyone know where i could get/how to make a XP repair disk

 

[Plastic Nev]

Hi, there are a couple of problems here with that drive having an operating system on it, especially XP that was obviously configured for a different system than the yours.
I think what may be happening is that the BIOS at start up is looking for a bootable volume and is finding the XP (When the drive is plugged in) and then trying to boot from it.
That operating system will see a new environment and will refuse to boot up, hence everything coming to a stop with the ntrldr missing message.

What you need to do if the eventual idea is to delete and reformat that XP drive, is to boot up without it installed, but before Windows 7 starts access the BIOS, using whichever key, quite often F2 or F10, then make sure the BIOS is set to boot from the existing drive first, it will find W7 and boot OK then, and ignore the XP.

Nev.

 

[KenB]

Please confirm:

1. The system boots up OK if the old XP drive is not in place.

2. The XP drive is jumpered to "Slave"

3. If the IDE drives are on the same cable that the drive with Win 7 / 8 on is on the end of the cable and the XP drive is on the centre connection.

4. The Win 7 / 8 drive is second in the Boot Order behind the DVD Drive ...........in other words the old XP drive is below the Win 7/8