Hey guys, I thought I had located the problem but it turns out I didn’t. Please help if you can with any suggestions. I’m willing to try anything. Below is the email I sent to the MoBo manufacturer support dept. I didn’t feel like retyping the whole thing.
Please help me! I am building a computer and cannot make this motherboard work. I can load Windows XP but after installing it, the system will not boot up unless the XP CD is in the CD drive. It will never boot from the hard drive alone. Sometimes when I try to boot with the CD, it goes into Windows and the machine acts like it booted from the hard drive alone (although it won’t do it without the CD in the drive) and sometimes it boots into the Windows XP installation routine. I can’t figure out how to do either consistantly. I’ve tried the installation using two different Windows XP Pro CDs. I also flashed the BIOS for the MoBo which I downloaded from your website. Unfortunately the BIOS which is on your website is OLDER than the one that came with the board. The flashing was successful according to the WinFlash utility but now the computer won’t boot up at all. It doesn’t get past the point where it detects the drives on the system – it just freezes there. Below is the important info about the system I’m building.
MoBo: ECS 661FX-M v1.0 (came with firmware 1.0g, flashed to 1.0f)
CPU: Intel Celeron D 2.4 GHz (Prescott core)
RAM: Corsair 512 MB
Primary Master: Western Digital 80 GB HD (jumper set to MASTER)
Primary Slave: none
Secondary Master: NEC 3500A DVD-RW (jumper set to MASTER)
Secondary Slave: none
Please help me as soon as possible.
P.S. The downloads on your website are out of date and hard to find. There is also no board-specific support available on your website.
BTW, yes, I do have the HD first in the boot sequence.