430FX board Help with IDE not booting problem \ VOGONS

430FX board Help with IDE not booting problem

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First post, by s.mouse

Posted on 2025-11-15, 22:41

s.mouse Offline

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Joined: 2017-08-13, 23:45
Location: Brisbane, Australia

Hey all,

I have an Asus P/I-P55TP4XE which will not booting from the primary IDE channel. It detects the drive and using a boot disk I can partition and format then install windows 95 fine, but upon restart it will error saying no boot device. If i plug it into the secondary channel it will boot fine.

Does anyone have any knowledge of which area of the motherboard I should be looking at to repair? Is there a specific pin responsible during the boot sequence at that stage? I know the SB82371FB southbridge contains the ide controller, ive checked for dry solder joints but can't fine any

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Reply 1 of 2, by douglar

Posted on Today, 15:27

douglar Online

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Joined: 2019-11-04, 15:37
Location: Ohio, USA

1) Check the pins on the primary IDE controller for dirt and corrosion.
2) Check the bottom of the motherboard for cracks in the solder near the primary IDE controller pins.
3) Verify all your BIOS settings one more time for differences between the primary and secondary controllers
4) Try another cable

Reply 2 of 2, by Deunan

Posted on Today, 16:44

Deunan Offline

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Joined: 2018-05-29, 12:32

If the mobo can detect and access the HDD but not boot from it then I would suspect the BIOS. It should have a checksum but it's not strong enough to detect multiple bit glitches for example. Also I spy a CR2032 mod there, I would try to erase CMOS settings via the jumper and then load defaults - to be sure it's not some weird setting issue.

Perhaps a newer (or simply different) BIOS version could help too, in case this one has a bug of some sort that just happens to manifest on this HDD. What size is it anyway? There are some common bugs like 8G and 32G limit and IIRC some AWARD BIOSes had issues with values close to or above that but not related to LBA. Was just some sort of stupidity in calculating sector number that had overflow of some sort, can't remember the details. Might help to try a different HDD, or limit it to 32G if it has such option jumper (the partition will have to be remade obviously).

And finally FDISK /MBR, just in case it's a simple boot code problem. I would expect it to affect the second IDE channel as well but who knows, worth a try.

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