PCTech Forums

I post this with the fear that I already know the answer.
Problem: Computer gives "operating system not found" message on boot. First occurrence was after trying to swap hard drives. The former drive that worked, is no longer working. Gateway generic motherboard to the best of my knowledge (I found no clear identification)

Attempted fixes:
1) Swapped IDE cables
2) Reformat - Says it cannot locate a hard drive.
3) Swap harddrive - 4 valid hard drives, confirmed working, all failed.
4) Check BIOS - Not an expert, but I didn't see anything out of place.
5) Reset BIOS back to default.
6) Tried a boot floppy - "Windows could not boot because of a hardware configuration problem"
7) Double checked that harddrives were working in my other computer.
8) Reseated the RAM.

Is there anything I can do before I blame the motherboard and have to buy another one (and processor/case/ram. I have an old computer )? Or should I just bite the bullet?

Have you checked the Master/Slave settings?

Yes, everything seems to be in order. All cables and harddrive settings are in the same configuration for both computers, and the same configuration they were when it used to work.

Check the IDE cables for a small square hole punched in it at one end. One or two of those cables can drive you nuts. Holes punched in the IDE cables mean that it is cable select. No master or slave in that case. Set them both to cable select. The furthest drive from the motherboard connection is the master and the middle one is the slave.

disconnect all the drives except the boot drive and see if it is reconized in the BIOS as the primary master. If it sees it as a secondary master or as a slave, its still hooked up wrong

Also make sure in the BIOS that the drives are all set to auto detect. Your new board could be set to none for 3 of them if an autodetect was done before you added drives.

Do the drives actually spin-up, can you hear them?

The only other thing I can suggest is to try a different PSU
You might have lost one or more of the 12volt outputs.

Alright, I'm up and working now. I DID have one of those funky cables, but that didn't seem be the only problem. The only drive that would work was an old 2GB drive. I booted that one with a 20GB secondary. Formatted the 20GB and reinstalled Windows XP on it. Took 2GB off, no go. It recognized the drive but would not boot from it. I was able to format and install AGAIN, which seem to have fixed the problem. At least for a little while. So, thank you for your help guys.

Just for future reference, When you do a Windows install only have one drive hooked up. The reason being, Wiindows will turn off the option to make the second drive active. Even if the drive is later set to primary, it will never boot. At that point if you boot up with a floppy and run fdisk, you can set the partition to active and then it will boot. Resetting the flag is faster than reinstalling

Naturally I learned all this the hard way myself . Good luck