Trouble with an optical drive on a new comp

Saeris

Copy/paste posting this for a friend of mine who is having some trouble, and can't seem to register on the forums himself:

D wrote:

MOBO: ASUS SOCKETAM2 CROSSHAIR
CD-ROM MASTER: Hewlett-Packard DVD ROM
CD-ROM SLAVE:ATAPI CDROM 48X
HDDS: 2 ST3250620AS (250G)

Background:

This is a fresh install of windows onto a system that has just been built. When the PC attempts to boot from the CD I get "Disk Boot Failure, Reinsert System DIsk". I have changed the boot order multiple times, but still the same error. The only time I was able to make any progress at all was when I moved the boot.cat and boot.img files from the CD to a floppy and had it boot from the floppy. Upon doing so I received a "NTLDR is missing" error. I realize that it was trying to find the NTLDR file on the HDD but being that Windows was never on the drive it can't find such a thing.

I have tried swapping the master/slave around between the drives. I pulled a different drive out of an old system and had that as the master/slave. I have also tried both drives singley without the other being hooked up at all. The hard drives were set up RAID Striping. I broke the RAID and tried that. I disconnected one of the HDD's and tried that. Nothing.

I know the drives read disks because when they're set to boot first they will actually read the disk that came with the MOBO. It's a setup disk that allows me to get the RAID drivers off of it for when Windows asks for them. This is the only disk that the drives will apparently read correctly when they're set to boot first.

Question:

How do I get windows installed on this machine?

He didn't mention the next part, but it seems pertinent: I was throwing every possible solution I could think of at him to try, and one of them was to make a WinXP boot floppy from his existing installation on the older comp. The notion was that he could then boot to that to try to get some diagnostics going on the optical drive, but it was somehow unrecognized, erroring with "Invalid drive specification" at the command prompt. This was with any disc in it, even including the driver CD that came with the mobo, which he said worked fine when booting to it.

Also, another important note: The BIOS recognizes the drives correctly, and they are configured on the proper IDE channels.


So, anyone have any idea what's wrong here?

Ruckus

Disconnect the DVDROM power cable, install Windows as if you had once harddrive and one CDROM, after windows installation is completed, shut down the computer, reconnect the power to the DVDROM and boot up.

I also recommend this Drive Boot Order:

1. Floppy
2. Optical
a)CDROM
b)DVDROM
3. SATARAID (I assume you're striping or mirroring the 250G's)