New mobo IDE problem

I replaced the motherboard in a customers desktop with a new Jetway M26GT4 V2. After Installing Win XP, I put the driver DVD in and the DVD/RW, it was like no disk was in it. I tried the other DVD ROM with the same result. I put a new IDE cable on with no joy. Just for the heck of it, I tried to boot from a DVD....nothing. This is where it gets weird. I installed a Promise Ultra TX2 PCI IDE controller and get the same results. CDs work fine. I can boot, read, and write to them. I contacted Jetway support, explained the symptoms and their reply was less than helpful to say the most....

"Our testing has shown the board can work properly with a USB/IDE DVD ROM without any problem. We can read and write the DVDs on it. "

Well DuuHHhh!!! It's supposed to. Why won't this one? SATA and USB DVDs work just fine. I tried to get my customer to change over to SATA DVD units but he insist " they worked fine before I brought it to you ".

I have never seen anything like this before. I tried setting the BIOS to fail safe defaults, but that didn't do any good either.
Anybody got a suggestion?

Thanks in advance,
Blufx

 

Have you checked the jumper settings on the drive/s?

"the other DVD ROM ", have you tried disconnecting one or other of the drives?

Copy the drivers to a USB memory stick or try burning a copy to another DVD disk (although I think you say no DVD disks will work).

Is it due to some software that is installed under Windows, although you say you tried to boot to a DVD?

Are the drives actually DVD ROM or DVD Rewritable? Can you test the drives in another computer?

Motherboard manufacturers are trying to get away from supporting IDE drives and they might not be doing it very well. I had a lot of problems connecting IDE (optical) drives to my motherboard. Check the jumper settings as I suggested...run the drives as Master/Slave or alternatively as both Cable Select. Try running one optical drive at a time (until you identify the problem).

I might consider a BIOS upgrade for the motherboard if you think that is the area and maybe look for firmware updates for the optical drives.

Something that may be at the root could be that the BIOS is set to look for the boot files on drive 0 on the IDE controller, it expects a HDD to be there, not an optical drive.

Matt

 

Thanks Matt,
The drives are actually a DVD ROM and DVD Rewritable Plus a third DVD Rewritable I had on hand. Yeah I checked the jumpers, I've tried using them one at a time. It won't boot from DVD but the same drive with a bootable CD works fine. I can see where one may need a firmware update, but all three? Not likely. As far as trying one in a different computer, the third one is out of my computer, not the customers. Haven't updated to bios, but it's a brand new board. It should have the latest bios. The bios is selected to boot from CD/DVD ROM, not drive "0" like some have.
This is weird.
I finally convinced my customer to go with the SATA DVD drives, but I'd still like to know what is up with this thing. I open for all ideas.

Mark

 

Which HDD are you using ? Is it IDE or SATA ?

 

It's a WD SATA

 

Can you boot from DVD when you remove the hard disk ?

 

I haven't tried that. I'll post back in a little while.

 

Nope. Tells me to insert disk

 

Strange.

May be a bad board. That's all I can think of at this time.

 

This is a weird one. Maybe clutching at straws but tell me precisely how the optical drive is listed in device manager.

 

mark, there seems to be some problem at the board/BIOS level itself as Blufx can't even boot from the DVD drive. I don't think Windows has any role to play in that.

 

You may well be right, I was just working on a hunch that maybe the system is only seeing the drive as a CD Rom, but not as a DVD Rom. Checking how it is listed in the Bios might reveal something also.

One other idea I had was to remove the drives in device manager and delete the upper and lower filters in the registry. Then let windows re-detect the drives and see what happens.

 

I removed the HD. It still won't boot from DVD. Windows has nothing to do with it.

 

OK, but what is your answer to my question in post 10.

 

Give me a few to configure it back and I'll post again

 

Ok, here you go. The DVD RW is jumpered as master. The DVD CD/RW combo is jumpered as slave.
Device manager list them in this order as:
LITE-ON COMBO LTC-48161H
LITE-ON DVDRW SHW-160P65