CD drive and fail to boot

[Renegade_8]

Anyone ever seen this? I ought the old but useful machine I'm typing this on was a goner. It intermittently failed to boot and eventualy was stuck at F1 to re-boot F2 to enter setup. I really thought the FAT and boot area was toast, possibly a virus. I ran the Dell diagnostic floppy ( I told u it was old must be about 8 here and a factory refurb Optiplex so prolly about 10! ). Anyway the HDD passed every test ( left it running while we were out for 100% surface scan). I eventually found that you have to disconnect the CD drive and it works fine. Its an IDE controler.
Setting the CMOS to only look at the HDD wont work. I now have to think do I need a CD on this machine, should I put a DVD in etc etc, Reason for posting, has this hapned to anyone else, I did not go into set up, jumpers are still in same place on CD and I plugged and unpluged the connector in case it was high R, no joy
This m/c is super useful to have as it has 15G drive which was as big as you could get then and I keep all my digital pics on this and one other machine so one disk can go and I willnot lose them. I am thinking of getting a RAID on this one and maybe run it as server under LINUX.
I fogot to write down the brand etc of the CD while i had the cover off.

 

[carlos1981]

I have only seen this twice in my 3 years... but that was the old Viglen C900's!!!!! (So glad i left that school job!!)

It can on a rare occasion be the IDE controller itself, which is what i found on one, which removes the option of another cd/dvd drive working, and leaves a new Mobo, as not many people will reccomend putting a HDD and CD/DVD on the same IDE channel. The other one was just a cable.

Just borrow any CD/DVD drive and cable to test this and if not working then new mobo needed.

 

[Liam]

PCI IDE card will help you get IDE back I think!

Liam

 

[Renegade_8]

Thanks guys, the systems performance says all the IDE stuff is working fine so a bit of a mystery. The m/c was delivered from Dell with the CD and HDD on the same cable and it's been fine up to now. I was bit surprised to find the cable was a stretch from the mobo to the HDD and thought I had found the problem, but no. Anyway, unless something where the support is on CD ROM crashes I wont need it so I can file it in "too difficult" for now

 

[Renegade_8]

Well someone kindly gave me a DVD thay had replaced with a burner, and I'm typing this listening to a CD on it, Dr Hook actually Silvia's mother although Queen of the Silver dollar is my favourite on that album. So simple hardware fault, you know you have been around computers too long when you never consider the simple answer! And the Queen of the Silver Dollar is home again!