Zeraph

When I try to boot up, most of the time, I get that message.

I've googled it and tried most of the solutions. i.e. NTOSKRNL.EXE is missing or corrupt.

It's been really odd though. Sometimes it will boot up after 5 or 6 retries. At first I thought it was the keyboard thing, and it unplugging it worked at first. So I ran a registry cleaner. It worked again. Then not. I ran windows repair. Worked. Then not. Messed with bios settings, worked, then not.

I just upgraded a bunch of stuff on my comp so I installed a bunch of new drivers (but didn't wipe the original hard drive). So I'm guessing it may have to do with that, but reformatting is a last resort.

The other thing it might have to do with is how I have my CDROM and harddrive set up on the IDE cord. My new motherboard only has one IDE slot (the rest SATA) and both previous mentioned devices are old, they only use IDE slots. And because of how things fit in my case, my CDROM has the "master" end, and my harddrive the middle "slave" connection. I have it properly configerued in my BIOS (I'm pretty sure anyway) and my CDROM pin's are set to slave.


Any ideas?

OCT

The Computerhope article you linked to covers all the basics, so there must be a more obscure cause for this problem.
I know in the past I've seen similar messages when a computer has tried to boot from a USB flash drive or external hard drive instead of your first internal hard drive - my suggestion would be to unplug everything other then the screen, power, keyboard and mouse and see if that helps at all.

If this doesn't seem to make a difference, try running the FIXBOOT and FIXMBR commands from the Windows recovery console, just as you did with CHKDSK in the Computerhope article. These will write a new partition boot sector and master boot record respectively, and can often solve similar problems.

Zeraph

Right on the money OCT. My early suspicion was correct. It has to do with how my IDE cable is set up. I disconnected the CD drive and it works. Now the tough part is figuring out how to get it all connected without getting the problem again.

Originally I figured that wasn't the problem because I tried disabling the drive from bios. But I guess that's not the same thing as physically disconnecting it.

n0nsensical

With IDE, the physical connection to the cable (master or slave) needs to match the jumper configuration of your devices. If the CDROM drive is connected to the master end of the cable, the jumpers need to be set to master or cable select. Either way everything should work, but the configuration needs to be consistent.

__________________
"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded." --Abraham Lincoln

Zeraph

So I should either figure out a way to put my harddrive above my ROM or switch my harddrive to slave? Won't it try to boot up from the ROM every time if its set to master? And how much of a performance issue we talking about? It's for gaming after all.

n0nsensical

Yea, you can set the HD to slave or cable select. The BIOS should automatically boot from the slave device if the master is not bootable. You can also change the search order in BIOS settings. Actually I misspoke in my other post, the master/slave setting doesn't matter for performance, but having two devices on the same bus could cause slower performance generally when accessing both at the same time. In practice, it might not make a difference since the bus is a good deal faster than either device alone.

__________________
"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded." --Abraham Lincoln