Motherboard see's DVD rom, Is configured to boot dvd rom, but not booting from dvd
 

Hey there everyone. Trying to install lmce on a new server I built to act as a media server. Hardware went smooth.

Motherboard is a bit older - Asus A7V600-x.

In a Coolermaster Stacker case that was given to me from a friend. I put an Antec 500 watt PSU. 1 IDE Solid State 16GB HDD (for the OS install), 1 IDE DVD Rom, 2 IDE Hard Drives (40GB ea), a 6 port add-on Sata card, a 2TB Sata drive, 2 - 80GB Sata drives.

Everything is booting up just nice. It pasts posts. The Bios see's everything, including the solid state drive. However, once it's done it's post it tries to go for the default boot device, which I have set as the DVD rom drive. This is where it fails. It doesn't see a boot-able device. Thinking it was maybe the solid state drive interfering, I disconnected that and left the dvd-rom and tried again. Same problem occurred. I get the familiar message when it finds no boot sector on anything "Press key to restart".

Finally thinking it was the dvd-rom drive, I tried a sata drive. Since my board naturally has 2 sata ports on board, I was easily able to configure it to act as primary boot device. However, this still did not fix the problem.

I'm at a loss as to what could be preventing it from seeing a boot device. I know the media is good as it boots fine in my old (4+ year laptop, and on all my other systems.

I burned the dvd at the lowest speed available on my burner.

Any suggestions on what to look at next on this thing? I'm going to disconnect power to all non-essentials, and just leave the power to the dvd-rom drive. But I would like to have some fall back advice in case that turns out not to solve the problem. I would think 500 watts would be plenty.

Thanks all :)
Carlo

Does the DVD boot on another machine?
Can you boot another DVD or CD ?

With four disk drives, it could be a power issue, depending mostly I would think on the power demands of the video card. What kind of video card is it? Is the PSU new or used? Power supplies' output can flag off through their lifespan. If it was used (or even new), hook it up to a multimeter and make sure you're getting the correct wattage.

Here's a stupid question: Have you tried a different disk to make sure that the problem is not just the DVD you're trying to boot from?

Also, have you removed any doubt in the boot device selection by only connecting the DVD drive to the motherboard and then trying to boot from it? I don't doubt that you've selected correctly, but it's good to eliminate all possible missteps.

Well to answer the questions hehehe - The dvd's/cd's do boot off other machines, so I know the disks themselves aren't the culprit.

The PSU is a few years old (under 5). I bought it new, and it was in use in my primary system. When I went from a low end video card to dual Nvidia gaming cards on that system, I swapped out the PSU for a 1000watt unit. It hasn't been used in the past year or two.

The video card on this server is, well - basic. 8MB AGP. Nothing fancy at all. Since I'm going to be doing everything from a console base, I don't see the reason to put anything more powerful in. It was the smallest AGP video card I had sitting around in my collection-o-old-misc-parts.

Thinking power issue, I disconnected the power to ALL the hard drives, fans, etc. Brought everything down to absolute bare basics. Just the motherboard and the dvd-rom were getting power. It did the exact same thing with freshly burned CD's.

The only thing I haven't done was hook the 2 DVD rom drives to my primary PC and test their functionality. The CDROM was working previously as I've used it for other server applications (once I install the server OS I don't leave the cdrom on it - can be used for other things). The Sata DVD burner I also tested with was something from work. We decommissioned parts from a few older systems. We usually replace the burners from the desktop pc's to standard readers, so we had a bunch of spare sata burners. As they were never really ever used, I just figured it would be good. But hind sight is always 20/20. I'm not sure how or where they were stored so its possible some damage may have happened. I'll have to test the unit's on my main pc to see if they are functioning. The units are seen by the BIOS. Set in the boot order as the primary boot device. The lights flash on the Rom drives during post, and the drive motor kicks in on them briefly. So you can see how it seems like they are working, but unfortunately this doesn't test the read head.

As it is right now I've remove the power to all the drives except for the dvd burner, on my main system. I've connected the 16gb Solid State IDE drive to that system, and started the install of Ubuntu Server 10.04 to it. The SSD will be the root drive. The other drives will be media storage drives. I was hoping setup LVM during install on them so that I can keep the IDE drives for music and photos, and use raid 0+1 to stripe the Sata drives for use for the videos. Its harder to setup LVM post install but not impossible. I just have limited spare time and I've wasted much with this issue so far. I'm also no master at Linux by any means of the imagination so I'm going to have to find a few guides to set this up. Again - No biggy. I'm patient, I'll find a way to make things work :) It might just boil down to me using 1 ide for music, and the other ide for photos.


I am a bit disappointed at the speed of which write transactions happen on the SSD, but I'm hoping it makes it up while booting and loading of modules. This server is going to be a big expandable NAS.. well more like a DLNA media server which will serve videos and music to my western digital set-top receiver unit. That's the only thing it will be used for. I'll administer everything through SSH from my laptop or primary pc on the second floor, including the uploading of the media. With the cost of Sata drives dropping so quickly, I can see me putting in a few more TB before long. Sata cards are fairly dirt cheap to. When I start putting more drives in it, then I will look at going to a 1000watt PSU for this project. But right now I think with the OLD motherboard and cpu that is being used, the low end graphics card, 3 fans and the hard drives, that the 500 watt "should" handle it.


:[edit]:
I just went to http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine which is a PSU Calculator. Based on the information I entered, minimum required psu is around 263 watts, with the recommended being around 313 watts. Since its a 500watt psu, it "should" handle everything just fine in theory. Another thing I'll try on the motherboard itself is to reset it to factory defaults. I'm not sure if this MB was ever overclocked. If so, that can be wreaking havoc. I just thought of this now.

I believe the issue is resolved.

The problem was 2 fold

1) I had baught the motherboard, ram, and cpu in as a system I had purchased from the school I was attending 2 years ago. I hadn't realised that it was overclocked.

2) The IDE Ribbon that I was using was faulty.

How did I discover these? Well I discovered everything in a weird way of course! First I discovered that the ide cable was faulty, when I took the IDE SSD up to my primary unit, and plugged it in. The reason why it was slow for installing was due to the faulty cable. The install finnished, but apon rebooting grub had problems launching. I at first thought it was the SSD drive. However on a whim I located a good IDE cable in my collection of parts (still sealed in a package), plugged it all in, and tried again. This time around the install zipped through at lightning speed. When it rebooted, it booted fine.

As for the over clocking, well the Faulty IDE cable explained why the CDROM was being seen by the bios but wasn't able to boot any cd's/dvd's. But it didn't explain why the sata dvd burner wasn't working either. After taking a chance and reseting the bios to defaults and lowering the CPU clock setting to it's lowest, it worked to worked just fine. It must have been causing an issue on all the bus lines.

Anyhow its working. Or at least it appears to be. I'm doing one last reinstall of Ubuntu Server 10.04 to the SSD, now with all my drives connected.

Thank you all for the advice!

Thanks for letting us know how it turned out. Hearing about problems like this and not being able to access the hardware myself, then never finding out what the issue turned out to be drives me nuts!

Congrats! It sounds like you'll have a rockin' little media server in short order.

LOL except for the fact that one of the smaller used Sata drives is about to die, its working all nice and according to plan LOL

The great thing about picking up or inheriting parts from work is that they are free lol

I'm not worried if one of the 80gb sata's die. I'll planning on putting in another 2tb anyways lOL

I didn't install Ubuntu server as I planned Put in linux Mint for all the various codecs to be used for streaming. I've got it OC'd to 1667Mhz and running stable. Might try to push it a bit further but that might be asking for trouble. I was going to install all but the main boot drive as LVM, but as I can't guarantee the health on the used drives - after discovering that one of the 80gb sata's are failing, I think it would be easier to just leave them as is and format them as extfs4 or extfs3. The Western Digital TV Live Plus should see all the media content within the drives regardless of the partitioning schema. I just need to make a primary folder in them for music, video, etc, and make sure they are samba shared. I'll get DLNA working to, but I don't think it will be a big deal. From what I've read the Western Digital Live TV Plus is using a Linux Kernel and custom OS, so I'm going to assume that it can read a Samba share. I'll know in a bit lol