Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

[cornorstone]

Re: Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

question, do you know that the optical drive will boot on another system? do you know that the drive works as it should?

Vin

I don't have another SATA system to try it on, and I'm not yet ready to purchase a pci to sata conversion card. But it is read by the system as first boot drive and DVD/CD's can be read & written to. Just can't boot from.

[cornorstone]

Re: Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

Just for yucks disconnect all drives from the SATA ports and plug the DVD drive into SATA_0 and see if it will boot with a bootable disk. If it does then shut down and connect the HDD and see what happens.
I would for sure clear CMOS first in case something got screwed in the bios, and maybe even reflash it.

If you tried that then beats heck out of me.

Drive 0 and drive 1 are 6 GBS ports. and I have to have 1 of them to run my 4TB hdd from. Can I plug a DVD into a 6 gbs port? I will try it if you think it won't hose it up, because I don't think the ODD is 6GBS.

[profJim]

Re: Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

Your sata port connections for your drives look fine.
Evem the highest quality power supplies can develop problems, even if they are brand new. The VX450 psu was an entry level psu in 2007 and 2008 that got excellent ratings from JonnyGURU and HardwareSecrets, two of the best psu review sites. Even if it is fairly new, it's possible that it might have problems. If you make assumptions that any hardware component is good, you might be wrong.

Boondocks suggestion in post #8 is excellent, where he said:

"Just for yucks disconnect all drives from the SATA ports and plug the DVD drive into SATA_0 and see if it will boot with a bootable disk. If it does then shut down and connect the HDD and see what happens."

This should be a quick and easy test.

The suggestions I've posted in your thread are steps that I sometimes/often have to do when booting from my optical drive.
Later today, I'm going to boot my P35 system with several bootable OEM optical disks and repeat the booting test using some bootable optical disks that I created.

I'll post my results later tonight.

[Vinster]

Re: Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

I have a few optical drives that I can't boot from... but work great in windows... I wouldn't rule out the optical drive just yet.

Vin

[profJim]

Re: Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

I had no trouble booting with DVD's, but CD's didn't work well.
These results applied to factory and homemade optical disks using my Lite-On iHAS424 LightScribe sata DVD writer.

[boondocks]

Re: Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

Drive 0 and drive 1 are 6 GBS ports. and I have to have 1 of them to run my 4TB hdd from. Can I plug a DVD into a 6 gbs port? I will try it if you think it won't hose it up, because I don't think the ODD is 6GBS.

I'm not saying run the DVD on SATA_0 24/7, just to try it with everything else unplugged. If you prefer, plug it to any port you want with no other drives connected. You are not going to hurt anything, it's not like you HAVE to have a SATA III drive on a SATA III port. This is just for testing to try and help you figure it out.

I've seen a variety of things cause problems, in no particular order:
- a bad SATA data cable that works sometimes and sometimes doesn't.
-BBS priorities not set right in bios
-boot order wrong in bios
-general problem of unknown origin that requires a cmos reset
-bad SSD
-incompatible SSD's (rare)
-bad SATA power cable
-corrupted bios that needs reflashing
-need to set optimized defaults, boot to windows with minimal configuration, then reboot to bios to set up everything (usually when overclocking)
-faulty psu
etc etc
I run 6 drives on one of my UD5H and once in a while it gets picky about booting if the BBS priorities aren't set just so.

[- wardog -]

Re: Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

As always in these forum things, I forget to mention little bits of information. Active Undelete, which is the program I am trying to run and is a self-booting program, will not boot from the DVD. Neither will 3 different flavors of Linux, Knoppix, Lindows, Seagate Diag/Install disk, Western Digital Diag disk, or even Windows 7 install disk. Sorry I did not mention all this previously. I am just so bent out of shape that I can't get this thing to boot. Sorry.

My vote after reading the above(especially the above!), and all other posts: Defective CD/DVD drive

[cornorstone]

Re: Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

could this issue be this stupid? This is a new build, so obviously I have to reinstall windows 7. I finally got around to "activating" the install. Now the ODD boots. I swear I haven't been smoking crack or anything. I want to thank everyone that took tome to answer my question. I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. <3

[Vinster]

Re: Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

Activating windows shouldn't have anything to do with it... ODD booting is before windows gets involved....

Vin

[- wardog -]

Re: Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

Activating windows shouldn't have anything to do with it

Activating windows doesn't/didn't have anything to do with it.

[profJim]

Re: Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

Sounds like divine intervention to me.

[cornorstone]

Re: Help!!!! What am I doing wrong????

Sounds like divine intervention to me.

this one has my vote.