Hi Kyle,
You know, it might be that you have a problem with primary and secondary
disks.
IDE disks have a primary and secondary setup. This is the jumpers on the
back of the disk next to the IDE connector. There is also a 1st IDE and
2ndIDE connector on the MB.
I suggest that you remove all the disks and CDs. Then locate the 1st IDE
cable. Make sure that pin 1 on the cable (usually has a coloured stripe
on the cable) is plugged into pin 1 on the MB.
Reseat it if you have to. Then connect this to the hard disk. From
memory pin 1 on the IDE disk is closest to the power pins. Set the
jumper to MASTER on the disk.
Boot and go into the BIOS and check that it sees the disk and nothing else.
Partition the disk and make sure that the first partition is active. I'd
make one partition for the whole disk for an initial test. Then format
and install something.
Power off and on, and I don't mean soft reboot, Power down. Then on
again and see if it boots to the HDD.
If ok here then add one device at a time. If on the same cable as the
HDD then make sure that the second device on the cable is set to SLAVE.
See how you go.
Thanks,
Ben Donohue
On 8/06/2011 9:54 PM, Kyle wrote:
2 or 3 yr old pc running SiS-661 chipset, celeron and 1GB. So your
average every day bog standard pc with an 80GB IDE HDD.
Ubuntu 10.10 runs fine from live CD, albeit a bit slow. Even installs
fine, albeit slow.
Used to dual-boot XP / Ubuntu till me dear sweet mother asked me to
add in an old disk of hers formatted in FAT32. Suddenly, it popped up
with;
"Boot disk priority has changed. Please enter setup to check bla blah
blah." Never booted since.
FAT32 disk since removed. Original disk wiped, partition table wiped,
reinstalled Ubuntu only. MBR zeroed out and full OS re-install.
And the bloody thing STILL won't find the OS on boot. Does POST, finds
HDD + 2 CD's, tries to boot from CD, then comes;
"DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER"
Boot from live cd again; run fdisk, far as fdisk concerned all
partitions there with sda1 marked as boot. MEMTest all good.
Everything seems right. Only peculiarity I can see is despite wiping
partition table and writing empty table to re-boot again from disc, is
when creating partitions it gives me sda1, sda5 (swap) and sda6 (/).
What happened to sda's 2, 3 & 4?
BIOS shows this disc as first in HDD boot order after CD's.
Can anyone offer any suggestions as to why this thing simply refuses
to locate the boot partition please?
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