Help!! first time builder

[djam24]

Last night I finally got all my parts and put my PC together. Here are the specs:

Sunbeam Transformer Full-Tower Case
AMD64 3200 (Socket 939)
Arctic Cool Freezer64 CPU Cooler
ECS Nforce4-A939 Mobod
Western Digital SATA 200gb HDD
Rosewill 184-Pin 1GB DDR PC3200
Samsung Dual-layer DVD+/-RW
Samsung CD-DVD
EVGA Nvida GeForce 6600 256mb PCIE

The initial build was a breeze, everything went together perfect. However, now that I have it all together I am having issues with my cd drives. When it tries to boot from CD it gives me the following errors:

PXE-E61: Media Test Failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting Nvidia boot agent

The first thing I noticed is that my mobod is only recognizing one cd drive at a time. I can switch the cable back and forth to both drives and it will see one, but never both at the same time. I checked my cable dozens of times last night and im 99.99% sure it is connected correctly.

Also in the bios, when I look at my list of IDE devices, it will show one of the cd drives and the SATA HD. The cd drive will be under "0 Master HDD IDE:" and the SATA HD will be under "3 Master IDE:". This also seems odd since the cd drive is showing up under HDD IDE and the SATA HD is showing up under a normal IDE. I have both my cd drives connected with an IDE Data cable connected to the Primary IDE connector on the motherboad, and the SATA HD connected with a SATA data cable.

I'm sure the solution is simple, but since this is my first build im pretty much ignorant when it comes to simple diagnostics. Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[lynx6200]

Give this a try. First, your cd/dvd drives should be connected with one cable going to the mother board, a single cable has two connections. Choose one fo your cd drives to be the master drive, and make sure the jumper on the back of the drive is set to master while the jumper on the other drive is set to slave. When you have two items connected to a cable like tha,t one always needs to be set as master while the other is slave.

 

[djam24]

Thanks lynx, I'll give that a shot when I go home today. Another quick question: What should I set my Boot Device priorities? Right now I believe they are set as follows:

First: Floppy
Second: Hard Disk
Third: CDROM

Do these ever need to be changed?

 

[tomb08uk]

No, set them as follows:

CD ROM
HARDISC 01
FLOPPY

Thats if you are installing via a CDROM, or if you already have a hard disc with the OS on then swop the CD-ROM and Harddisc around.

 

[lynx6200]

I usualy stick with that setup; floppy, HD, CD. You always want your HD before your cd cause it will boot faster that way. But you can change it when you need to boot to cd for windows or something.

 

[tomb08uk]

Sorry, also no not likely ever to be needed to change one set, but the majority of the time the BIOS will be preset to boot from cd so just build the PC and then boot up and see where it trys to boot from

 

[djam24]

The setup that I gave above was what the mobod set as the default settings. So in all reality the order doesn't really have a huge impact, other than speed, of the bootup?

 

[lynx6200]

Thats all I know that it affects, but, of course you want to boot to your HD primarily cause that would have the operating system. The floppy I usualy leave first just because thats been traditional to do that, and you can boot to a floppy without going through bios. You only need to change to the CD first if you need to load windows or some other software off of cd, but than change back to the default setup afterwords.

 

[tomb08uk]

Yes thats right, for first time make sure set to CD-ROM and then can just leave it as once everything is done if you boot the PC and their is a CDROM in the drive you will be asked to press any key if you want to boot the cd, just ignor it if you dont and that means it will just by pass it.