Boot Problems

This is a system using a Soyo Dragon+ mobo, Athlon XP 1700+. It's my
daughter's machine and has been working fine for the better part of a year.
She started having problems that I couldn't recognize over the telephone.

She shipped it to me and when it arrived it seemed to work. I reloaded
WinXP Pro and it's been working fine for a few days.

Among other things she was having boot problems from a floppy, it booted for
me as soon as I received it.

I hate these problems that disappear.

I was doing some final testing, low and behold it would not boot from
several different bootable floppy disks that work fine in my system. For
example with a WinME boot disk it would load the CDROM drivers, RAM disk and
then report a Failure Reading Drive A. I tried a few times and always
stopped at the spot in the boot sequence.

I tried booting from a bootable CD, will not boot.

When I boot from the HDD, floppys and CDs can be read fine from within
WinXP.

The boot order was changed in the BIOS during testing according to the
device I was trying to boot from at the time.

I have changed floppy and CD-ROM drives.

My current guess is bad Dragon+.

Is my guess accurate or is there something else I should be trying?

Thanks.....

Bishoop wrote:
This is a system using a Soyo Dragon+ mobo, Athlon XP 1700+. It's my
daughter's machine and has been working fine for the better part of a
year. She started having problems that I couldn't recognize over the
telephone.

She shipped it to me and when it arrived it seemed to work. I
reloaded WinXP Pro and it's been working fine for a few days.

Among other things she was having boot problems from a floppy, it
booted for me as soon as I received it.

I hate these problems that disappear.

I was doing some final testing, low and behold it would not boot from
several different bootable floppy disks that work fine in my system.
For example with a WinME boot disk it would load the CDROM drivers,
RAM disk and then report a Failure Reading Drive A. I tried a few
times and always stopped at the spot in the boot sequence.

I tried booting from a bootable CD, will not boot.

When I boot from the HDD, floppys and CDs can be read fine from within
WinXP.

The boot order was changed in the BIOS during testing according to the
device I was trying to boot from at the time.

I have changed floppy and CD-ROM drives.

My current guess is bad Dragon+.

Is my guess accurate or is there something else I should be trying?

Thanks.....

Reseat the floppy and IDE cables. If that doesn't do it, replace the
cables. They're cheap and they do go bad, usually with intermittent
problems as you describe.

--
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
Douglas Adams

"ICee" wrote in message
news | Bishoop wrote:
| This is a system using a Soyo Dragon+ mobo, Athlon XP 1700+. It's my
| daughter's machine and has been working fine for the better part of a
| year. She started having problems that I couldn't recognize over the
| telephone.
|
| She shipped it to me and when it arrived it seemed to work. I
| reloaded WinXP Pro and it's been working fine for a few days.
|
| Among other things she was having boot problems from a floppy, it
| booted for me as soon as I received it.
|
| I hate these problems that disappear.
|
| I was doing some final testing, low and behold it would not boot from
| several different bootable floppy disks that work fine in my system.
| For example with a WinME boot disk it would load the CDROM drivers,
| RAM disk and then report a Failure Reading Drive A. I tried a few
| times and always stopped at the spot in the boot sequence.
|
| I tried booting from a bootable CD, will not boot.
|
| When I boot from the HDD, floppys and CDs can be read fine from within
| WinXP.
|
| The boot order was changed in the BIOS during testing according to the
| device I was trying to boot from at the time.
|
| I have changed floppy and CD-ROM drives.
|
| My current guess is bad Dragon+.
|
| Is my guess accurate or is there something else I should be trying?
|
| Thanks.....
|
| Reseat the floppy and IDE cables. If that doesn't do it, replace the
| cables. They're cheap and they do go bad, usually with intermittent
| problems as you describe.
|
| --
| "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
| Douglas Adams

During the process of changing to known good drives the cable were also
changed.

Thanks anyway....

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