Hey, I just pulled my old tower off the shelf to try to resurrect it for a friend, and I'm having some strange problems. Basically, it WAS working 100%, then I got a new desktop and pulled the HDD's out of this one then just shelved it. Now, all I've done is pull it out and put a new HD in it and tried to install Windows XP. No luck. Now before anyone gets on my case about asking about XP here, just hear me out. After about 6 hours of no luck with the XP installation, I figured it must either be the disk or the hardware. The disk looked fine, but just to be sure I tried installing Ubuntu 8.04.1 from a disk I had sitting around, I figured if I could get a live session running at least I'd have something and then I could look into things in more detail. Live session went off without a hitch. I though, ok try installing Ubuntu, maybe it's just my XP disc is scratched or something. Then I hit what seems to be the EXACT same problem as with XP, again making me think it must be hardware. Here is what happens, from the beginning (for either OS):
1. Boot from disc (fine)
2. Run live session (Ubuntu only -fine)
3. Install (installation completes successfully)
4. Reboot from HD (fails on boot)
My first thought was the new HD was bad, so after installing Ubuntu and having it fail to boot same as XP, I took the HD out and put it into another computer and it booted just fine!
So, my HD is fine, my CD-ROM is fine, both installation discs are fine, and apparently I can boot from the CD-ROM just fine (for both OS's, even though XP doesn't have a live session, the installation process runs fine). So what kind of hardware problem could cause boot failure from a perfectly good HD and yet allow CD-ROM boot just fine? I've tried fail-safe BIOS defaults, and throwing about every BIOS setting I can think of... now, 8 hours later I'm just pulling my hair out... any help???
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