drive not found for new comp

[tw1112]

Hi, I am in the process of putting together another new comp for myself this time. The specs are as follows:

Shuttle SN41G2 (nforce2 chipset)
AMD Barton 2500+
Wester Digital 120GB HDD
Mushkin level II ddr3200 1GB for dual channel
NEC DVD+R drive
For now I took out my gpu and am using the onboard geforce4mx

Here's the problem. I got everything in the comp and started it up for the first time. Went into bios setup to make sure everything was set correctly in there and to see if the nec and hdd were showing up. Everything was good there. At startup the primary master reads and detects the hdd and secondary master detects the nec. Then the comp slows down a whole lot, I am thinking because I haven't formatted the drive? After trying to boot off the xp pro cd and formatting in there, it wouldn't work, so I installed a floppy drive and used a bootup disk to fdisk and format. Well here is where the problem comes.

After it starts up with cdrom support, it doesnt seem to be able to read the C: HDD. When I go into fdisk it says at the bottom in flashing letters, "Drive 1 not reading" or something along those lines.

Anyone have any knowledge on what may be going wrong with my comp? Thanks! I really want to get this thing up and running asap.

[Micro Bean]

When you try to boot off the WIN XP what does it do?

[Omardeth]

is the hd the master and the dvd+r the slave ? if they are on the same cable make the jumpers are correct on them and the master , which should be the hd is on the end of the cable and the slave is in the middle . if that is correct make sure that the cable is a udma 100 cable it should have a blue end and that end plugs into the motherboard . if that is correct i would move the dvd+r off the cable with the hd and put it on the ide2 channel .

[tw1112]

Yeah I guess being tired yesterday made me do stupid things. In the rush of wanting the system up and running, I forgot that I was only installing 1 hdd and I set that to master. Right after settling down for the night and laying down in bed, it hit me to check on that. Moved the jumper to make it a single drive and voila! Thanks guys!

Now I am just having a lot of trouble inside of xp. It keeps giving me Error Report things and crashing! argh..Can't even get on the net to update the drivers and download winxp updates.

[Omardeth]

whats the ps in the system? maybe it isn't up to snuff . i have the same problem . i changed the ps and bam it was fixed ,.

[meese]

How do you connect to the internet? Dial-up? DSL? Cable? If DSL or Cable do you have the NIC card configured properly? Is it integrated into the motherboard or a seperate card?

[tw1112]

Ok here is what I have so far...It's the geforce4 card. When I take the agp card out of the system, the system runs fine with the onboard graphics. When I put the card in, it gives me errors and also makes the vga driver appear not present. I tested the card out in another system and it works fine...I am hoping that with a nforce driver update the problem will be fixed..::cross fingers::

[tw1112]

ARGH!!!!!!!!! So I went on shuttle's website to see if there are any newer bios to try out to fix my problem. Well they happen to have an updated bios that seems like it would fix my problem. I downloaded, put it on a boot disk per their directions, and rebooted my system. Went into the bios flash utility and flashed the bios. Everything went smoothly and it said Flash Complete. Taake out disk and push F1 to continue. I did so and then the screen went blank. I thought, ok maybe it restarted for me. Nothing happened. I hit restart myself, nothing happened...I shutdown the computer and then tried with the addon agp card. Same thing, the computer is turning on but the screen is not getting a signal anymore. It doesnt seem like the system is booting into windows either because after I while I push buttons on the keyboard and there is no hdd activity.

So what now? How can I revert back to an older BIO so that I can access my system again?

[beppodmime]

Are there any beep codes or anything like that when it restarts? Do you have any other memory you can try in the board, or try using only one stick of the stuff you have? Have you tried holding down the insert key when rebooting? Also try moving the CMOS jumper to clear for a minute and then back and see what happens. Other than that, other people may have more ideas.

Just a few ideas...

[tw1112]

Thanks beppodmime, I will try that stuff out right now! I forgot about the insert key thing..I heard that it works sometimes for these nforce boards.

Funny thing about the Ram is that, it works perfectly well for the onboard..you think that the system is having trouble working with the 400mhz bus freq of the ddr3200?