Hi guy, I'm having a major headache with my PC and would love some advice. Set up my new PC and everything seems fine, it boots to the bios screen but always says "A: Drive Error". I don't have a floppy drive and have one HDD and DVD drive which it recognises. I have told it to boot from my DVD but it just always says this A: Drive Error. What do you think it means. Appreciate any help/support.
This happens a lot with older boards, although I wouldn't be surprised if some newer ones had the issue. You should be able to solve it by going into your BIOS and disabling the floppy controller and then changing the "Halt on" (or similar) setting to "All but disk/keyboard".
Apparently it says that I don't have a primary master ide drive. It reads my Hard drive and DVD ROM as 3rd masters??? Why would this be?
Does your motherboard have SATA connectors? On some other boards I've seen, the 4 sata plugs are the first and second channels and the IDE is the third. If you give us a make and model it might provide us with some better information.
Do you mean secondary masters? You haven't really given us enough information to work with, so I can't say exactly what's wrong. Either way, you've got something configured incorrectly along the line. Make sure that both your DVD-ROM and hard disk have their jumpers configured for cable select mode, and then put one on the very end of a cable connected to one port on the motherboard, then the other one the very end of a cable connected to the other port. If you're using SATA drives, the situation is somewhat different. You should just be able to put the DVD-ROM on the end of a cable on the motherboard's primary channel (should be marked IDE0 or similar on the board) and leave the SATA drive where it is.
Possibly the jumper settings on the hard drive. If this is IDE, then you want your HDD on one channel and your optical drives on the other, otherwise the optical drives will slow down the access speeds on your HDD. The jumper settings should be master on one device and slave on the other, for each device on each channel. (there should be a sticker on each drive explaining which jumper setting is which).
The motherboard is this: MSI 915P NEO2-F, I915P, Socket-775, Sound, SATA, ATX, GbLAN, DDR2, PCI-Ex16 I only have IDE devices so no SATA. At the moment I have no jumper settings on them, but I have tried every possible combination of jumper settings. The "a: drive error" problem has now gone which is good but now it boots up and won't recognise the windows xp disc. If I put my second hard drive in, which has windows xp already isntalled it tries to load windows up and fails. If I ask it to boot from disc it just says wrong boot disc. Even though it is the right one!
No jumper settings? That doesn't sound good. Just setup your drives as cable select for the time being to get things working. What is your boot order and is the XP disc covered in scratches?
No jumper settings? Set to cable select as detailed above to avoid any problems. Does the XP disc work in another computer?
Yes the XP disc works in another computer - I will set them to cable select. The boot order is my dvd drive then my hdd. It comes up with an error message along the lines of restart and select boot drive or insert correct boot media and press any key. Which just repeats itself over and over. The DVD drive is whirring so it sound slike its going but it just doesn't read it. Any other ideas?
Garside, you have another topic open about the same exact problem right? Is there any way you can consolidate the discussion into one thread so people trying to help out in both know what's already been said?
