PCTech Forums

Last night my PC decided to stop booting. When I power up the comp, all it does is one long beep, then nothing. It is still getting power, fans are going, disk drive lights are on... just no booting.

What I had done earlier was swap harddrive out. It is set up with two harddrives, I had disconnected the Master harddrive and booted the computer up with an old drive of mine. Afterwards, I switched back to the original Master harddrive, and the computer booted up just fine... but I noticed it no longer found the Slave (D:) drive. So I thought to reboot... powered down, and then this problem occurred.

I tried and retried all the cable connections, switching to different power cables on both Master and Slave drive, and swapped the IDE cable thinking it might be a bad cable. Still same. Not sure why it would have booted up once after switching back to original Master drive, or why it didnt find the Slave drive when I did that. Any help would be appreciated, im at my wits end

mithril,

Depending on your BIOS, it's either bad ram or your video.

Use to see all the major BIOS beep codes.

Hi Mithril

On the boot, check to see if the keyboard lights sequence (flash) when it tries to come up.

I'm thinking that you have some cable select IDE cables. Check them for a small rectangular hole punched out close to one end. If so, the connector closest to the one plugged into the motherboard is the master HD0 and the second is HD1 (Slave). Both Hard Drives need to be set to cable select. If you have two cables, hook one hard drive up to each cable, first socket, then hook up the cdrom.

The other thing you need to look at is which socket is the IDE cable plugged into on the Motherboard IDE 0 or IDE 1. The master will not boot on IDE 1 if the slave is on IDE 0. I think that you have mixed up a few cables. See if this is of some help