Rebuild DVD/CD drive diskfailure

[yanhchan]

I had to rebuild my HTPC due to an unfortunate HDD failure on monday morning.

The system consists of
Gigabyte E35 DS3L
2 GB Kingston DDR2 800
GTX465 (overkill but I like to game too)
64GB Kingston SSD V200 (new to replace my old main partition 750gb Seagate)
Pioneer DVR-118 DVDRW (SATA)

I am having issues installing ANY OS on this machine, I remember back when I first built it I had installed OS with both USB and DVD drives. I have never modified the BIOS other that mem speed.

When I go to install XP on the old IDE drive it would say "Boot Disk Failure Please insert and press key", I then proceeded to repete with different copies of XP and W7, all of them result in the boot disk failure messege.

I swap out the IDE DVD drive to my SATA Pioneer DVR 118 DVDRW, still no dice, all of them say boot disk failure, I tried enabling and disabling AHCI the only difference that makes is that the dvd drive will at least try to spin the disks for a longer duration but wouldn't accept them as bootable.

I had some luck with the USB drive yesterday till I hit the snag where it asks me to install drivers (for the reading device DVD/CD/Floppy), although it is not needed as I am running off USB.

Anyway if anyone has experience with this sort of thing and can walk me through or give me a few hints I'd be eternally grateful, as would my family since they really miss watching things on the big screen.

May end up flashing/updating bios but that is the least favorable option as I haven't done it in a long while.

 

[bignick277]

What is your boot order in the bios. You said you've installed new hardware, but not modified the bios. So I would check the boot order in the bios. And, if you have more than one hard drive in your htpc, make sure it's booting the correct drive first.

 

[yanhchan]

I have tried

Combo A
1 USB
2 CD/DVD
3 HDD

Combo B
1 CD/DVD
2 USB
3 HDD

Combo C
1)Removable
2)HDD
3) USB


I'm having some luck with USB but W7 install had this stupid bug where it asks to install drivers for the drive you are using for the installation, normally thats not a problem however its a USB drive and I tried that switching ports trick, its not working

 

[bignick277]

try cd/dvd then HDD then USB

If the usb isn't bootable from the outset it will give you that error. Also you will have issues installing to USB because during startup windows resets all of the usb ports which makes booting to a windows os installed on a USB very difficult and often needs special install scripts to get it to work. I don't know if it's still the same with 7, but XP was notorious for it. So I would recommend trying on CD/DVD and HDD as the first 2 boot orders. Make sure CD/DVD comes first so you can select the option to run windows setup.

 

[yanhchan]

@BIgNick
I will give that a try, haven't thought of kicking the USB to the last place, thats a good idea. Yeah I had tried USB install for XP but it was no dice, since it failed to find a bootimg or something.

Not sure if they ever fixed a newer distribution that allows direct USB install

**Sidenote**
For the time being I gave up and installed Ubuntu (first time in my life using linux in a non work related environment). Doing ok, since it gets me online and youtubing.

 

[jumpload]

how many different cd~dvd rom drives\hdds\ide channels~s-ata have you used in your testing ?
sometimes for trouble shooting you need lots of spare parts.
now you know why all my computers still have Floppy drives id check a feu things out at the command line, do you have a floppy drive on that pc ?

 

[yanhchan]

No floppy.

So far I've tried an IDE CD/DVD Drive, SATA DVD/CD drive (both are working tested on another fully functional machine). I am going to try to hack one of my HDD enclosures to work with the DVD/CD combo see if it'll run as external DVD later.

Side note>

On an unrelated matter

I have a machine that has both XP and Windows 7 installed, each in their own respective drives. It seems the windows XP drive (500gb WD) contains the MBR, and the Windows 7 installed earlier last year on OCZ 60gb SSD is only accessible through the 500GB drive during boot up. Now I know these platter drives can easily die, so is there a utility that I can use to create a boot disk/boot usb to preserve the MBR so I can retain access to the W7 drive if the XP drive fails?

 

[KaptCrunch]

i see F6 is current bios for your MB Rev.1

first update chipset, and MSM/RST run intel inf app to get current drivers

Is the HDD termed master and optical slave

In bios set AHCI other can be bad IDE cable

 

[yanhchan]

Looks like im SOL, i've tried everything I got close with the Windows XP and WindowsSetUpFromUSB 2.3 but it fails after the text set up, as soon as I get into the GUI part of the set up I encounter major problems like the machine not being able to detect the USB drive to get the rest of the files

 

[bignick277]

Yeah, your not going to be able to do it from usb. Especially XP because it resets the usb ports during start up. I've tried those usb installers as well and have never been able to get them to work either. I highly recommend you concentrate on using the DVD drive for installing direct to actual hard drive.