System Build Problem...Haalp!

[heavyharmonies]

Man, I'm stumped on this one.

My bits, pieces, and parts arrived from Newegg yesterday, so I plopped down last night to put it together. System as it currently stands:

Motherboard: MSI K8T Master2 FAR
CPU: 2x Opteron 246
RAM: 1GB Mushkin ECC Reg. PC3200
SATA 1: WD Raptor 74GB
SATA 2: Hitachi 160GB
IDE 1 Master: Lite-On DVD-Rom
Video: ATI Radeon 7000 Sapphire OEM
Case: Kingwin ALU KT-424-S
PS: FORTRON 550W

I installed Windows XP Pro without a problem, but once Windows was fully installed, the DVD-Rom stopped working. I can see the drive light on, but it just spins forever, regardless of what CD or CDR is in the drive. I can tell from the drive sounds and the inconsistent blinking rate that it's chewing on something. I eventually get a "Stream error" message in Windows.

I've swapped out the drive to an Asus 52x CD-ROM, with same results.

I've chucked the round IDE cables that came with the mobo for a traditional 80-pin IDE cable.

I've tried both Master and Cable-Select jumper settings on the drives.

What gives???

-Dan

 

[Zepper]

Is it possible you connected the IDE cables backwards? 80-wire cables can be connected only one way. Generally the mobo connector on the cable should be blue, middle gray and outer end black. Also try the drive on your Secondary IDE channel to see if it is any better.
. Also try clearing the CMOS then resetting the ESCD..

.bh.

 

[heavyharmonies]

I'm going [censored] nuts!

This is a clean install of Windows, so there are no previous app installs, documents, etc. that the system is trying to access.

The CDROM shows up in the boot sequence and I can boot from CDROM. It's only when it gets to Windows that it goes AWOL. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the device. The weird thing is that Windows recognizes the drive and displays the disc icon and name in "My Computer". It's only when I attempt to actually access the contents of the CD-ROM that things go wrong.

I've downloaded and installed the latest VIA "4-in-1 drivers" from viaarena.com.

3 different drives, 2 different sets of cables, both IDE channels, both master and cable-select.... nada!

WTF!??????

-Dan

 

[heavyharmonies]

Update:

I can access the drive via DOS and copy material to the hard drive.... just not in Windows proper.

???

-Dan

 

[boshuter]

I'm not sure this will help, but I just ran into exactly the same problem with a pc I was working on. The only difference was, the one I had was running all IDE, the pc had a fresh install of XP on 1 hdd on the first IDE channel, the cdrw was master on the secondary IDE channel. Everything worked perfectly until I tried plugging in another hdd as slave on the first IDE channel. That is when I had the same problem you have. It turns out the extra hdd was the problem, it was not empty, I was planning on formatting it after I installed it...... I never did get it to work, I had to format the drive then install it and everything was fine. I hope I explained that well enough Do you by any chance have files, especaially any system files on the non-boot hdd? You may try removing that hdd and see if the problem goes away. Like I said, this may not help being all IDE, but it's worth a try