No booting on a 4 year old emachine

[Number Six]

Yoda - I get the idea from reading your comments that the emachines logo splash screen is visible when the computer boots up and goes thorough it's POST cycle. This usually hides the screen that shows you exactly what the computer is doing - if something goes wrong during POST, then the computer will hang up on the splash screen, preventing you from seeing where it is stuck. It probably would be a good idea to go into BIOS setup and disable this splash screen, that way you can see a step by step listing of the boot process. What you should see is most of the following info:

Video card identification and logo
BIOS identification, date and version
CPU identification and speed
Memory size and a quick check
Disk Drive identification

After this, it should start booting the operating system

It would also be a good idea to set all the drives to auto detection in BIOS setup - this is the way I set up all of my computers as well as any computer that I work on for others.

If the computer does hang up again, you will see exactly where it is - if it happens to be that original Hard Drive, it will either freeze right there or it will say "NONE" installed on that channel.

I hope that this info is helpful to you



OH, By the way - I don't really see how "live long and prosper" fits with the Ninja Turtles. As Spock would say "ILLOGICAL" :P

[yoda313]

@number six - thanks for the suggestion. I'll try to look into that later.

As far as star trek and ninja turtles - hey I like both so I have to fit them in somehow - plus the rock on dude is a reference to both BILL AND TED movies from the late 80's early 90's so I have a unique mix of favorites - scifi, action and comedy there - by the way its the original 90's live action turtles I'm partial too in addition to the original cartoon series. Though I do like the TMNT cgi movie that i have on dvd as well - haven't gotten into the newer hand drawn series yet - don't know if I will ever do that either - but the cgi movie was decent.

[yoda313]

Ok I have another problem here.

I wasn't able to get it to boot today again. So out of desperation I unplugged the remaining dvd drive. This left only the new master 160gb harddrive and the nvidia video card installed besides the mobo.

Walla it worked! It said on reboot that the cd/dvd was missing do I want to continue and I said yes and I was able to get back into windows.

Previously I had been able to get into bios setup and disabled the splash screen.

Now my question is how do I properly reconnect the dvd drive? Its a pioneer 10x (not sure of exact model number anymore).

I had the master ide cable going to the pioneer drive the way I wanted it. In the bios setup should the dvd drive be first boot then harddrive? Or is it the other way around?

Also could it be the reformatting of the harddrive to original specs set the computer looking for the emachine dvd drive that is no longer installed? I haven't looked into that yet if it says emachine drive instead of pioneer.

I'll try these things out and let you know. But at least I was able to boot back into windows again. FYI the dvd drive was working. That was the drive I used to get the restore dvd working.

[aedipuss]

normal ide setup for older computers with 2 ide channels -
1st channel -(master) is boot hard drive, (slave) is other hard drive
2nd channel - optical drives (older pioneer burners like to be on the end of the cable with jumper set to master)

boot order after os install should have hard drive first for fastest boot.
floppy and cd in whatever order you want.

[yoda313]

Thanks aedipuss.

I'm back on.

I think part of it was USB booting was enabled. I stumbled on this when it would boot without a usb root hub attached to the pc and then hang when it was plugged in. So I had that disabled and plugged the two usb devices directly to the computer.

I also set the pioneer (111d drive after all) to master instead of cable select so that seems to be good now. I was able to install my disc of Norton Antivirus 2007 with it.

Ok so the boot order should be harddrive first then dvd/cd drive? Sounds good I can make that change next.

This was good for me. I hadn't realized how much I'd forgotten until I needed to do these test trials.

I do appreciate everyones assistance with this. Hopefully I'll get some more use out of this emachine.

[redwudz]

I've had a couple of computers that refused to boot when a USB thumb drive was plugged in. One of my Asus MBs seemed to do that. Of course it took me about a hour to figure that out first time.

It's best to have a HDD set as first boot, though it will work fine most times if the optical drive is set that way. But if you have a bootable disc in the optical drive it will boot from that automatically then. If not, it will just move on the the next bootable drive. Probably slows the boot by a second or so.

[yoda313]

It's best to have a HDD set as first boot, though it will work fine most times if the optical drive is set that way. But if you have a bootable disc in the optical drive it will boot from that automatically then. If not, it will just move on the the next bootable drive. Probably slows the boot by a second or so.

Ok I'm not sure I follow completely. I did change the hdd to first boot. I just want to confirm I'll have no problem inserting a boot disc if needed. Is that correct with a dvd drive as second boot?

----

As for the rest I seem to be on the right track now. As long as I get several boots in a row with the current setup I'll consider it fixed. Then I will eventually reconnect my original os drive as a secondary after I get things running smoothly.

Hopefully I will have salvaged the computer this way. It's nice to know as long as my motherboard is ok I should be able to reinstall via my restore disc as I need without restrictions.

Thanks again.

[Number Six]

Years ago, the floppy drive used to be set as first boot, then the hard drive - this was intended to allow you the option of bypassing the installed OS if necessary. When CD drives came along, they were not bootable. Floppy drives practically do not exist anymore, and are rather useless. I always set an optical drive to be my first boot device to give me the option to bypass the OS - if there is no bootable disk in the drive, then it will be ignored and the hard drive will boot.

If you leave the hard drive as your first boot device, then you can't easily boot from the optical drive - you will either have to go into setup and switch it, or find out if you have the option to hit a key and bring up a boot menu that will let you choose the optical drive first.

[yoda313]

you will either have to go into setup and switch it, or find out if you have the option to hit a key and bring up a boot menu that will let you choose the optical drive first.

I know how and where to switch the boot order know so that should not be too difficult should I need it. However I think I'll take a look around emachines website to see if they have a boot choice key - I do know that f2 is there setup key to go into BIOS upon startup. I don't know if they have another option - though F12 is to boot from network.