PCTech Forums

I have a westen digital WD400 hard drive with a CD-ROM and floppy. My system does not want to boot properly. When I can get the bios setup to come up it can see all the drives. For somereason I can not get it to boot to the floppy. i have diagnostic program on a floppy. At one point I think I got it to bootfrom the CD-ROM but it would not boot into safe mode. This problem just came up one day. The system had been running just fine. Then one day it just wouldnt boot up. I changed the jumpers on the CD-ROM and hard drive to get the bios setup screen. Can anyone help me?

Hi glazer012

In order to boot from the floppy you may need to change the boot sequence in the Bios. After changing the sequence you need to save changes and exit. (which should be F10)

In order to boot into Safe Mode you tap the F8 key repeatedly at boot until the option screen appears.

You hard drive should be set as master on IDE Controller 1 and the cd-rom as master on the IDE Controller 2.

The thing is I did change the boot sequence. The only time it can even think about booting to safe is IF i can boot from the CD-ROM with the Windows XP disc in there. But it froze and wouldnt boot. It will not boot to the floppy even when the bios boot sequence is setup that way.

have you stuck your hard drive into another computer? If this just occoured for no reason.. perhaps your hd is failing or is now dead. I'd suggest testing it in another rig to be certain, although I may have misunderstood, but since you said you can only get it to boot in safe mode with the cd, perhaps you have some corrupt files or sectors on the drive are going bad.