help... problem with cold boot

wish

Could some one may be tell me whats wrong.... here...

When I do a cold boot the system tells me that no boot media was found.
Its fine if I hit restart at that point then it will boot fine.


ok here is my sys spec.

mother - MSI 745 ultra
hchip - athlon xp 1600
hdd - quantum fireball 40 gig
mem - 256 meg of gen ddr
psu - 300w

I am really woried has any one else had the same problem.

BTBB

I once had a similar problem - if you have the same get new hardware.

I'm currently using the system - P166 2.5GB 32MB.

We added in a 500Mb drive which could only be recognised by the BIOS on a warm boot. What was happening was that the drive didn't warm up in time. My solution was to add a 3 second delay to the boot sequence before looking at the IDE channels.

It is unlikely that your BIOS supports this feature(too new). Try the drive in another system. It could also be a PSU problem - sending power to the motherboard before everything else but this is unlikley.

BTBB

zAbbo

What operating system and what is the exact error message, could be something to do with either a corrupted MBR or a boot.ini file.

If its win2k check to see if the boot.ini file is correct, failing that boot into the recovery console then into PC-DOS and correct the MBR.

Thats my opinion but could be something to do with the hardware setup. Post more info like

1. Did machine ever work ok

2. Did you install any recent programs/hardware

ETC.

Hope any of this helps...

Also could be something simple like drive jumpers(some drives are picky)

BTBB

This is not a software problem.

I hit restart at that point then it will boot fine.

This also means that jumpers or are unlikely as a problem.

It is something with the boot phase and drive recognition.
Replace the offending HD with any other IDE device (CDROM, DVD another HD, anything but SCSI or floppy) and see if the new drive is recognised or do you have to warm boot. Remember to set it as master. Also it will be (almost) impossible to boot with this configuration so remember to change everything back. The only purpose of this test is to see if it is the HD or the IDE channel.

BTBB

steve-hosting36

Most modern BIOS's will let you set a boot delay, or HD delay, which will give the HD time to spin up in time

HTH,
Stephen

wish

I will try that thanks

as for more sys detail...

Its a win2k pro with mandrake 8.2
and lilo is the boot loader.

daveJAM

Well if none of the above work then this will save you having to press reset.

http://www.bit-tech.net/article/70/

Gerry

This was working, and then one day it stopped. So maybe you changed some setting or moved something around?

Saruman

BTBB has it right with the pre-delay.. seen this a lot with Quantum drives... only i would set it to 6 - 10 seconds instead with a larger drive like yours..

Quigs Snr

I have seen this problem before on some SIS based boardS (Specifically based on the SIS735 board which the MSI 745 is a derivative of).

I am wary of the quality of any SIS based system at the moment, as the chipset appears very very sensitive to power quality. I have had 2 identical SIS735 boards where one has failed to work correctly with a particular power supply, but the other has. To compound matters the one which didn't work did work with a different PSU. (Both boards were bought on the same day, same revision, same batch - suffice to say their QA control appears to be suspect these days).

ANyway to the point of the matter. Although a 300w PSU is technically speaking fine. I think there is a reasonably good chance that this is the problem. ECS who manufacture boards based on SIS chipsets admitted to me in a personal email response that there were a few considerations to be taken into account when choosing a PSU for their SIS based boards.

Heres roughly what they said.

TCO (Total combined output) is important. This should be marked on the PSU. As a minimum this has to be 180W, however they recommended 220W to be safe.

The TCO is made up of amps on various voltage lines. The 2 important ones are thus:

5V line should be over 20A (Ideally 30A)
3.3V line should be over 20A (ideally 28A)

I tried a Codegen 350W Psu in my faulty machine, it didn't help. Turns out that although it says 350w it's TCO was only 180 and the value of the 3.3V line was only 14A.

Now this seems to be inconsistent because I eventually got the machine running with a spurious 300W Psu which in the BIOS only reported 3.08v on the 3.3v line (VERY WEAK). But it still worked.

So my advice is this. Try to get a loan of some different PSU's. For your setup I would recomend a 400W with 28A (This will be written on the PSU)or more on the 3.3v line. If you have a power issue this should solve it. In maybe 4 instances I have seen this problem. It has once been solved by uprating the power supply (or even just changing it - not all 300W are made equal). On the other 3 occasions the board was RMA'd back to whence it came and replaced.

Good luck.

Quigs Snr

By the way, the timing delay mentioned above can also work, because it gives the drive a bit more time to power up. I have seen and ECS K7S5A based on the SIS 735 chipset fixed that way.

However you shouldn't have to fix it to get it to work. I reckon they should replace it for you under warranty.

Gerry

Judging by the amount of flak that board has gotten around the web, its more ECS's fault than anyone elses. It was an early board to market, these things happen. Of course the Irish pc trade is hooked on elitegroup so Ireland probably get stuck with a load of boards that didn't sell in other countries.

If you are referring to a board other than the ECS, fair enough. Anyway, wish's problem is not a failure to post, it seems more like a bios problem than a psu problem. Also, the machine was working perfectly before he messed up the partitions on the hard drive, which doesn't point to a power problem, and it works perfectly stable once rebooted.

Quigs Snr

Gerry, I've had a number of the ECS boards, the Ali Magik based K7AMA was quite a dependable little number as was the VIA based K7VZA, however neither set the world on fire performance-wise. The only one I have a beef with is the K7S5A (One of which I use in one of my own machines- that one works great, but it's an exception rather than a rule). As you correctly pointed out ECS rushed this one to the market and in my opinion produced what was in reality an unfinished board and using the general public as a test department, the problems were accentuated from revision4 onwards where they reduced the capacity of one of the ZP resistors in the move to make it XP compatible, this caused untold grief. You only need to look at the ECS forum on ocworkbench.com for evidence of this. The irish market love them because they are so cheap. I can buy them for 70 Euro in the UK, my local shop here charges 120 Euro (which is still cheap for Ireland I suppose).

No the board which had the power problem (which was resolved by a new PSU) happened to be a Chaintech board (I'm sure it was no-coincidence that the others -which weren't fixable and required an RMA - were ECS).

I don't see where Wish mentioned anything about messing up partitions, although presumably with mandrake on there, he must have been at it. Although again I can't see in the thread where he says the problem occured after changing to this configuration, perhaps you got this knowledge from a previous thread ?

I still think it would be premature to rule out a power problem. A reasonable quality 300w is the bare minimum for a machine with this configuration. I would like to clarify that the chaintech failed to recognise a DVD drive on cold boot, but on hitting the reset switch booted perfectly also. The machine only ever had a problem on a cold boot.

To rule out a bios problem, I would use the "restore to factory defaults - or similar" option in the Bios, this will set your bios to auto select the drives etc... make sure your cpu fsb is set to 133/133. etc.... try it then. This is only for an advanced user and I don't know what your level is in that regard (if you know your way around a bios and set it up yourself that is- otherwise leave it alone and ask someone else to do it). For double assurance you could download the latest bios for your board. Again if you are not comfortable with flashing a bios, DON'T DO IT. Seek help from a techie.

It still smells of a power problem to me. Ludicrous as it may seem PSU's can degrade over time. A cheapo I got with a JNC case used to run 3.24v at 3.3V line, but degraded to 3.08 over the course of 6 weeks.
It's probably a gross oversimplification, but essentially your machine powers up it's various devices in a sequence. The hard disk is 'usually' one of the later elements of this sequence. From a cold boot, by the time the bootstrap tried to check on the status of the hard disk it might not have enough power to pick it up. The reason it then works on a reset, is because essentially the power line stays on and powers up the harddisk in the meantime. This also explains why putting a delay in helps as it gives a few crucial extra seconds to allow the disk to spin up. Its a bit more complicated than that but you get the picture.

This is why given the current information we have, I wouldn't rule out a power problem. It could yet be any number of things. However, I urge you not to run out and spend 100 Euro on a 400w Antec PSU just yet. Try to get your hands on a mates machine or bring it into a PC shop and tell them you want to buy a PSU, ask if you can install it in the shop and try it out. This is what I did (and it saved me a few quid on a 400w codegen I was looking at - which didn't do the job). If you're down around the south east, I'll let you try out one of my 400w PSU's. If it doesn't fix the problem at least you can rule it out.

Gerry

I should have pointed out that wish is a friend of mine, and I helped him put together the machine. I've seen psu's degrade over time also, however this normally manifests itself with lockups under load, and the machine does run fine under load, when it is rebooted. Power supply degradation normally occurs more with psu's that are borderline, I have seen it happening with 250w psu's on athlon machines. It is also only about 2 weeks old, and has a 340w chieftec branded (though enlight I suspect) psu.

He is in work now, so won't get to try anything till this evening. I think the hard drive predelay should work, or else I'll just update the bios for him, as it is an early revision.

Quigs Snr

Ah that explains it. I read the thread about 3 times to see what I was missing. I've seen the Chieftec alright. I like it. Seems like a good PSU, quite heavy, although by no means always a good indication I always feel reassured of a PSU's quality if it's heavy !
It should be up to the job alright so I'd be surprised if the BIOS update / boot delay didn't work.

You're right about the lockups too, in my degraded power supply and high loads, the problem only came to light when trying to run a 3D game like op flash. Sometimes it would last between 1 second and 20 minutes.

Good luck anyway lads.

wish

Hey Guys thanks a lot.... learned a few new things here....

and has a 340w chieftec branded

Gerry, I dont see that any where, but since you know more about these things I will take you word on it.

It could be the BIOS....
Gerry did help set up(well he did most of the work) my machine, and the story is that I was playing with partionMagic and I did things (which will never be spoken) the short end is that I ****ed it so good that I had to wipe and do a new install.
There is a problem with my machine when installing an OS I have go into the BIOS and turn eevry thing off, then do the install then turn stuff back on....
So any way when I was doing the install I had to mess about with the bios settings.... that could be a root cause come to think...

Saruman

In that case if resetting the default options does not fix, move the jumper to clear the cmos... also if you fecked up your partitions or corrupted your FAT table on the hard disk.. it might be best to run a utility to destroy all info on the drive.. hdd manufacturers have the utilities like maxtor, western Digital etc... I know of one that Gateway supplied (made by western digital but works on all drives) there is an option to write zeros which basically writes a zero to ecery sector on the disk.. not only does that solve problems like bad sectors etc it fixes some faults scandisk says are hardware! Its basiacally a LOW level format you need to do.. If you want that one download the Universal Boot disk from the gateway website: http://www.uk.gateway.com/ftp/desktop/misc/bootdisk/v4614win.exe

Run it, make the boot disk and the utility is in a folder called gwscan... dead handy.. copy it to your own windows bootdisk if you like.

JustHalf

Yes Saruman... his computer is messed up enough already, so let's try a low-level format!!!

wish

Thats ok....
I do not need to reformat my drive...
did that when I was reinstalling....

ok I used fdisk to....
delete all partions...
create one partion as big as the drive... format that partion...
delete it then run the win2k install from cd.

It worked fine.. I lost all my data but it worked fine.... /me must learn to back up stuff...

have not had time to fiddle with the BIOS yet...
will try soon then let you all know.. how I got on...

Thanks again for all the info