Usually it's common practice to have the HDD as a primary master and the Cd-rom as a slave, and not the opposite. Have you tried it ?

also, have you tried setting the jumpers to master / slave on the devices instead of cable select ?

Do you have another ribbon cable so you can connect each device to their own IDE channel ?

Agree with MMaximus. Don't use cable select (I never used it myself but I heard it is troublesome). Don't put CD-ROM as primary master, either primary slave or secondary master (or slave if there is another drive on master)is fine. One of these things might confuse the BIOS.

Regarding 40GB drive: That's entirely possible. I read your BIOS screen as 1.2 beta 3 from 13/08/1998.
I don't know if these are the correct BIOS files: http://www.msi.com/support/mb/MS6119.html#support_download
The p2.7 and s2.8 updates from 11/11/1999 state "Support IBM 37.5GB HDD" and the s2.a update from 21/08/2000 states "Support IDE HDD size over 65GB."
Do the drives have a jumper to limit capacity to 32GB or even 8.4GB? That would be an easy way to check if this is the issue.

Where have you configured the boot priority? Does this board even support booting from CDROM?

Since the hard drive isn't being auto-detected in the BIOS, and that POST screen appears to be freezing at the point of detecting that same drive, it appears to me that it's getting hung up on the hard drive for whatever reason (maybe the size). Have you tried booting with just the CDROM and no hard drive attached?

If that doesn't help, I agree with earlier suggestions to try jumpering specifically as master. I remember I didn't really trust cable select on systems back then, I think it didn't always work properly. Not sure if that was because of motherboard or my cables, I just vaguely remember having problems with it sometimes.

SquallStrife wrote:

Where have you configured the boot priority? Does this board even support booting from CDROM?

Since the OP wrote "When I set BIOS to default and then set CDROM or the correct IDE slot as primary boot device (actually no matter how I set the boot order)," I assume that the BIOS supports setting the boot order and includes CD-ROM in the boot order. I suppose that's pretty standard for a PII mainboard?
Unfortunately I can't find a proper manual. The manuals on the MSI page I linked to refer to an Award BIOS but the screenshots clearly show AMIBIOS.

Just had a closer look at the screenshots. The hdd is a ST340014A which definitely has an alternate capacity jumper for 32 GB, see http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/a … /cuda7200pm.pdf page 21. (Pins 1 and 2, the ones closes to the power connector.)

Thanks for all of the responses, guys. 😀 I have indeed swapped both drives through all permutations of Primary/Secondary/Master/Slave to no avail, other than the screen where it hangs showing either Primary Master... or Secondary Master...depending. I have not tried to connect only the CDROM with no hard drive attached. I will give that a go to at least determine that the hard drive is the culprit in some manner. Inhave changed the jumper on the hard drive to reduce it to 32GB, but all that does is have it detected as 32MB, shows up when detecting hard drives, makes it a slave (?), but still hangs on the above screen. I'm really thinking that it's a capacity issue at this point and I plan to try to find an 8GB hard drive or so to test with. I will follow up after trying to boot with only the CDROM. Thanks again for the help.

I have never had an issue with cable select or having optical/removable drives as the Primary (nor having everything on one IDE channel). So I can't see that being the problem here. Generally speaking I use CS in builds, as it is easier and "just works" out of the box.

Try booting the machine with no hard-drive attached, and see what it does. It sounds like the hard-drive is holding everything up, either because it's taking too long to start (if there's a "hard-disk pre-delay" option you may try playing with it - plenty of older drives actually need this), or because it's not compatible, or because it's faulty. If you're jumpering it to 32GB or smaller it should report 32GB or smaller, not 32MB. That leads me to believe something is wrong with the drive (and a drive that supports being jumpered down in size will work in an older machine with BIOS capacity limits - actually, you can even boot up too-big drives and just manually configure them in the BIOS to have usable space).

Some other thoughts: is everything getting adequate power? Are all of the power and data cables in good condition? Have you reset the CMOS (via jumper or pulling the battery)? Have you tried "diagnostic boot" (that is, pull *everything* but the CPU, boot up, it should beep at you, add one RAM module, boot up again, it should beep at you, add graphics adapter, boot up, should have keyboard error, add keyboard, boot up again, should have bootable disk error, etc)?

use two IDE cables, it works better, hard drives on IDE 1 and Cd's on IDE 2

candle_86 wrote:

use two IDE cables, it works better, hard drives on IDE 1 and Cd's on IDE 2

"Better" relative to what? And based on what? There is nothing (at least nothing beyond "because it was, so it will be") that says one type of device must be on any specific channel. The controller gives no preference to "IDE 1" or "IDE 2" (or whatever they may be called). Putting both devices on one channel *may* impact performance, especially with older drives (likely much older than what's at work here) on older controllers (generally much older than what a P3 would be equipped with, however) in certain usage scenarios (and would not cause the symptoms being reported here). The poster has also indicated he/she has tried a variety of configurations to no avail, so bickering about how well the wiring conforms to some idealized notion of "typical practice" is also moot here.

Remember the other nasty trick of CS...
On 80 wire cables, the far socket is CS master, the middle is CS slave.
On 40 wire CS implemented cables, the middle is master and the far end is slave.
On 40 wire (not implemented) cables, both equal CS master

What's the difference between a 40-wire CS or non-CS cable, physically speaking?

They are all CS. It's the jumpers on the drives that decides what is Master, Slave and Cable Select.
Never seen or heard about CS not being part of IDE specifictions. If non-CS exists, I would really like to know were to read about it.
Set the jumper on the HDD to Master, and the jumper on the CD/DVD to slave.
Connect HDD first connector on the cable (middle connector on the cable) and connect the optical drive to the last connector on the cable.
Then try again. If not working, swap the drives around. This should work.