No boot after dvd drive removal

Hi guys,

My Dad recently thought 'I'm gonna upgrade my RAM, lets do it with the computer turned on.' Since then, that computers motherboard has failed to work.

I've now rebuilt his PC for him, with a spare motherboard I had from an old build and what not, and everything was running fine. I installed Windows via a SATA dvd drive, onto an IDE Hard drive (Cannot boot via usb, and only have the one IDE port other than an FDD one).

The dvd drive is from my own PC, so obviously I wanna take it out. Done so, went to boot my Dads PC back up again to start installing all his things and adding backed up files, folders etc. No luck. Upon turning the PC on, presented with the normal malarky, then the safe mode, safe mode with networking, safe mode with CMD, last known good config and start Windows normally.

Selecting any of these options, the system will restart itself, and go back to the start. Letting the 30 second time run down, and the system will restart itself, and go back to that screen.

Thought maybe it was just a bad install, so put the disk drive back on, and what do you know? It boots up perfectly fine. Unplug the SATA cable from the motherboard to the drive, turn the PC back on, back to square one.

Anyone got any ideas on how I can get the PC running without the SATA disk drive in there?

Cheers
Chris

 

Hi, have you set the BIOS to recognize your HD as first boot option? Neil.

 

Neil's suggestion of setting the boot drive in the BIOS would also be my first test.

Something else I might consider is that removing the DVD changes the drive letter system. So if Windows is supposed to be on the C: drive, that might be changed when you remove the DVD.

In Windows, go to Disk Management, check the drive letters. Are they standard? Did you install Windows on a drive other than C:? Are there any other drives?

The startup system (BIOS) only looks for a C drive, and expects the boot files to be located there (the boot files seem to be there, but the Windows drive may have changed it's drive letter).

Matt
(Please reply to Neil's suggestion. Ask him (us) if you are unsure.)