HowToFixComputers.com

David Ruggiero · Guest

I have a Soyo Dragon KT333 Platinum Ultra, which I cannot for the life
of me get to boot from the CDROM or DVD drives. The drives spin up on
boot, the bios (Award 6.00PG) autodetects the drives are there, XP is
happy to see, assign a drive letter to, and read them - but the boot
sequence just skips past them as if they're not there at all. The CD
doesn't spin again after the initial power-on reset.

I'm a pretty *** experienced PC tech - this isn't anything obvious.
Just in case, though, here are all the things I've tried in the past 24
hours - none of which have worked:

- flashed the mobo to the latest (2aa9) bios, even though it was
already there;
- verified that it boots fine from both the floppy and hard drive,
every time;
- changed the boot device order about 100 times (CDROM first, CD in the
middle, CD last, CD in all three available boot slots, "boot other
devices" on and off, etc)
- tried three different optical drives (CD, CD-RW, and DVD-RW)
- tried all the optical drives on both primary and secondary IDE
connectors, as both master and slave on each one (even tried slaving
off the hard drive), in various combinations of one or two drives on
the same cable
- tried three different ATA cables (both 80 and 40-pin varieties)
- slowed the system way, way down (to 600mhz from 1.8ghz) and used the
fail-safe memory timings
- tried to boot innumerable times from the secondary boot menu (ie,
hitting ESC after POST but before the actual boot to get the menu of
devices)
- pulled all other components out of the machine except the boot CD
drive
- tried three different bootable CD/DVDs that are known good

Soyo doesn't make motherboards anymore and their tech support wasn't
able to give me any other ideas. Anyone out there, after reading the
above list, have anything to offer? I'm about to go out and buy the
dead chicken and wave it over the case - otherwise I'm out of ideas.

thanks....d

PS: Failing this, is there a way to make a "bootstrap-boot" floppy that
I can then get the system to boot the CD from?

Wes Newell · Guest

On Wed, 06 Sep 2006 11:55:40 -0700, David Ruggiero wrote:

Jonathan Rogers · Guest

Wes:

Thanks. I took it in today to a guy who's forgotten more about
troubleshooting PCs than I'll ever know....and after playing with it
for an hour, and replacing every component except the mobo and CPU, he
was stumped as well. ("Never seen anything like that..."). So more
confirmation it's nothing obvious, and the likelihood it's a weird Soyo
BIOS bug - or bizzare hardware problem affecting this board at boot
time but not at any other - is even higher.

Tonight I'm going to stick an old 600mhz Duron in it instead of the
fast Barton and see if that changes anything... I thought of the boot
delay idea, but it's not an option on this board. (If that was all that
was needed, though, I would have expected the bios not to even
recognize the CDs were there...) I *did* try much the same thing,
thouhg, by turning off the CPU L2 and L3 caches, which made the system
take 20x as long to boot into windows - but didn't change anything as
far as the boot.

Thanks for the lilo idea - I'm well acquainted with Linux - might try
that.

I'll post if anything of interest comes up.

thanks,
David

Wes Newell wrote:

Rick Hallman · Guest

Tap the Escape Key after the POST beep. It will give you a boot menu. This
is documented in the motherboard manual on Page 82. You can download it at
http://www.soyousa.com/downloads/filedesc.php?id=1769

"David Ruggiero" <thatseattleguy@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1157568940.380999.19230@i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

Jonathan Rogers · Guest

Rick:

I did that - perhaps you missed this section of my original posting:

" [I] tried to boot innumerable times from the secondary boot menu (ie,
hitting ESC after POST but before the actual boot to get the menu of
devices)"

Interestingly, using that "boot menu" I can't even get the floppy to
boot - even though the floppy boots just fine during the normal boot
sequence. I suspect Soyo has problems with their boot logic in
general...a moot point since they're out of the motherboard biz.

Rick · Guest

Well I find all of that as odd since I use a Soyo KT-333 DUP and the Boot
Menu works as it shows in the Owners Manual. The BIOS ID is K7VXBP-2AA9.
This all occurs before the OS loads so it must involve your BIOS or it's
setup. My normal boot is a HD attached to the IDE3 channel but I do not use
a HPT raid array. I have 2 DVD drives (Master/Single drives on IDE 1&2) and
which ever one contains a bootable disc will boot the system. Sorry I can't
help you.

"Jonathan Rogers" <thatseattleguy@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1157833568.853766.113430@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...

schmooxx1x · Guest

Frustrating problem. The only other suggestion I can think of is to
flash to an older bios for that board. See if cd booting works. If
not, flash back to the most current bios. You may be correct in
thinking that the bios programming is buggy.

I know first hand that a "newer" bios from Soyo doesn't necessarily
mean better. I have a Soyo board, and upgraded the processor. In
order to correctly recognize the processor (P4 3.2ghz prescott), I had
to flash to the latest bios. After flashing to the newer bios, several
problems appeared. First, my pc would no longer enter standby -
whenever it tried to, I would just get a acpi error message. Second,
the bios would not recognize the 2 dvd drives. This is intermittent -
sometimes they are recognized, other times they aren't.

When I flashed back to the older bios, the two problems I mentioned no
longer occur. So the latest bios is definitely buggy. Unfortunately,
the older bios only recognizes the 3.2ghz processor as a 2.8ghz.

Good luck.

Mike S. · Guest

"David Ruggiero" <thatseattleguy@gmail.com> wrote in
news:1157568940.380999.19230@i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

Meander Holefield · Guest

"David Ruggiero" <thatseattleguy@gmail.com> wrote in
news:1157568940.380999.19230@i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

dave AKA vwdoc1 · Guest

AFAIK you will need these conditions at least:
1. BIOS set so that the computer will boot from the CD/DVD drive first!
2. Bootable CD/DVD (I have seen some WIN98SE CDs that I could not boot from)
3. CD/DVD drive on IDE 1 (may not be necessary but I have had to do this
with some computers)

Try it with the Hard Drive disconnected.

Is this the first time you are trying to boot this computer? Are the
settings correct for Master and Slave, or Cable Select?

Meander Holefield · Guest

retsuhcs@xinap.moc (Mike S.) wrote in news:ekn6l9$2mh$1@reader2.panix.com: