Have tried 100 different ways...can't boot from CD-ROM nor DVD

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 damn 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?

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

> I have a Soyo Dragon KT333 Platinum Ultra, which I cannot for the life

I'd try a search for cd booting on that MB. Might come up with something.

> 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?

It's possible using lilo as a boot manager on the floppy. How well do you
know linux?:-)
man lilo
man lilo.conf

I've had problems with some boards booting from CD's, but usually get them
to work by setting all boot devices to the cd, and disabling other
devices. You may also want to put a boot delay in the bios if it supports
that, giving the cd/dvd time to spinup and read the media and initialize.
good luck. Sounds like you need it. Please let us know what happens.

--
Want the ultimate in free OTA SD/HDTV Recorder? http://mythtv.org
http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html Usenet alt.video.ptv.mythtv
My server http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/cpu.php
HD Tivo S3 compared http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/mythtivo.htm

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:
> On Wed, 06 Sep 2006 11:55:40 -0700, David Ruggiero wrote:
>
> > I have a Soyo Dragon KT333 Platinum Ultra, which I cannot for the life
>
> I'd try a search for cd booting on that MB. Might come up with something.
>
> > 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?
>
> It's possible using lilo as a boot manager on the floppy. How well do you
> know linux?:-)
> man lilo
> man lilo.conf
>
> I've had problems with some boards booting from CD's, but usually get them
> to work by setting all boot devices to the cd, and disabling other
> devices. You may also want to put a boot delay in the bios if it supports
> that, giving the cd/dvd time to spinup and read the media and initialize.
> good luck. Sounds like you need it. Please let us know what happens.
>
> --
> Want the ultimate in free OTA SD/HDTV Recorder? http://mythtv.org
> http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html Usenet alt.video.ptv.mythtv
> My server http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/cpu.php
> HD Tivo S3 compared http://wesnewell.no-ip.com/mythtivo.htm

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" <> wrote in message
news: ups.com...
>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 damn 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?
>

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.

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" <> wrote in message
news: oups.com...
> 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.
>

I came across this problem a few times on my sy-7vem, i finally just puit in a 98 boot disk and formated the harddrive, then stuck in the xp. if you dont want that then go to microsoft and download the xp bootdisk you'll need six floopys. then you can use the cd, as i have done this before also.

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.

"David Ruggiero" <> wrote in
news: ups.com:

> 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.
> 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?
>

I'm using the Soyo Dragon P4i865PE Dragon thing that was free after rebate
from NewEgg.

I've had troubles booting from CD's and DVD's in the past. I think there
are two different kinds of boot images in the 16-bit world: emulation and
non-emulation. I think that "emulation" refers to an image that resembles
(or emulates) a boot floppy image. This P4I865PE can't boot to some discs
that are non-emulation 16-bit types. Maybe the same is true for you?

I now use Bart's PE Builder to make bootable discs:
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

It takes some time to learn how to configure it. You use a Windows XP
installer disc to create a boot setup so that optical media can boot your
computer to a 32-bit Windows XP environment. I think it mimics the
Microsoft Pre-Installation Environment software that is normally released
only to OEM's and such.

Nice thing about Bart's PE Builder is that powerful 32-bit environment.
I've created 1 CD that has hard drive imaging software, web browsers, Nero,
and on and on. Bart's PE builder includes an "explorer" so you can view
and copy data from the drive. It also includes other utilities. Many
software companies provide plugins so that they're software works in Bart's
PE. On top of that, there's many different 3rd party contributors who help
making plugins.

(For me, Nero only burns at 1X when booted to that environment. Maybe I'm
doing something wrong and maybe it should burn faster. I don't know. I
don't burn many discs that way. It's nice to know, however, that I could
gather data from a non-bootable hard drive and burn the recovered data to a
DVD.)

Bootable CD's and DVD's made with Bart's PE builder work even on this goofy
Soyo P4I865PE-Dragon II Plus motherboard. If your computer can boot to
optical media, I'm guessing it should boot to a disc constructed using Bart
PE.

//rus\\

"David Ruggiero" <> wrote in
news: ups.com:

> 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.
> 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?
>
http://bootcd.narod.ru/bcdl150z.zip

This is a bootable floppy that loads appropriate drivers and then
transfers boot to a CD/DVD.