First timer...

[Tigerbite]

Well, I've been around computers since I was 6 (14 years), but I've mainly been into software, and recently I plugged my desktop into a bad outlet and fried the power supply and the motherboard. Since I was on a small budget, I figured I'd just buy some replacement parts and hope for the best.

Well, I bought a new power supply, mobo, cpu fan, ram, and video card.

My computer turns on and all, but I can't get past the "press del to setup" "press f8 for boot" and "press f1 to continue" screen.

I was also told that the Master had to be the hard drive and the slave had to goto the cd drive. Well, when I do that, the cd drive isn't detected, but when I have the master sleeve in the cd drive, they're both detected, BUT they're detected as the "third" driver...the primary and and secondary drives all show up as undetected.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?
Also, I tried installing XP when I had the cd drive as my master, but after "formatting the space" it went back to the setup/boot screen.

I'm stuck :(

[chunkylover53]

From what you've given us here, I'd say HD as master and cd as slave as well. Restart, press del to enter the bios, set your boot order to the cd drive, and reboot to try and load windows. Then again, I'm not too familiar with IDE hard drive and optical. :confused:

Other thought, are there jumpers on them that need to be changed maybe?

Sorry I couldn't be more help.

[Lerxt]

Make sure that your BIOS has HDD type set to "Auto" (for all drives) - it will try to detect your drives and you will get some "not detected" - this will determine if you have the drives connected to the MOBO in the proper channels (primary IDE, secondary IDE, ect).

Also, IDE drives have jumpers on them (next to the power and data connectors) - if you have a master/slave set up then the "master" has to have a jumper ensuring that it is set to Master (usually there are three jumper settings, Master, Slave and Cable Select). Check your CD/DVD and make sure it's jumpers are set to "slave".

When the jumpers are not properly set the drives will not respond to the BIOS no matter what the settings are in it. If you have more than one IDE channel, I would suggest putting each drive on its own channel - then you don't need to set any jumpers since the default is "master" for each drive.