System will not POST when optical drive is fitted

[DaviesDickie]

Hello All,

I am working on a Toshiba Equium A100-549. When the system is switched on it goes through it's POST routine but will freeze. The bar will get to approx 75% along and hang.

If I press F12 to select boot device, this will give me the boot options and I can then select the HDD or optical drive and the system will boot.

If the ODD is removed then the system will boot (after a slight pause when the bar is at 75%)

I have updated the BIOS.
I have tried alternative ODD (H-L and TEAC)
I have tried alternative CPU

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Dickie.

 

[Mark56]

Try going into Device Manager and uninstalling the CD drive by right clicking on the device and selecting uninstall. Then reboot and Windows will reload the drivers.

Let us know if this works.

If not, do you have the same problem if you boot into Safe mode?

What version of Windows are you using?

 

[DaviesDickie]

Thanks for the reply Mark but the problem is all pre windows loading related. For example when F12 is pressed to select the boot device the options list comes up. The system also somtimes hangs when F2 for the BIOS is selected.

We have fitted another optical drive that is letting the system boot after quite a while in the POST screen so it's looking more like a compatability issue between system and optical drive.

 

[mailpup]

I don't know much about laptop optical drives but do the optical drives you've tried have jumpers at the back? The specs of this laptop suggest to me that the drives might be IDE rather than SATA. If so, like desktop drives, they may have jumpers that need to be set correctly.

 

[Mark56]

My previous post was based on what you said in your opening post:-

When the system is switched on it goes through it's POST routine but will freeze. The bar will get to approx 75% along and hang.

This tells me the problem is after POST and therefore is during the boot up stage of Windows when the drivers are being loaded. One of the first drivers to load is for the CD drive. I would suggest you try re-installing the CD driver which will only take a minute or two. If the driver is corrupted it could be the cause of this problem.

The hang when going into Bios could also indicate a failing hard drive as it could be having difficulty locating it. Try removing the hard drive (with nothing in the CD drive) and then boot up in the normal way and see how long it takes to tell you that no system disc is found (or similar error message).

Have you tried booting into safe mode?

What version of Windows is installed?

 

[DaviesDickie]

There might be a bit of confusion what "bar" is being talked about. While the system is going through it's POST, (Phoenix BIOS) there is a blueish bar, at this point you can press the F keys for BIOS and boot device etc.

OS = XP home (SP3)
auto update of DVD/CD ROM done and no new driver found.
System now starts normaly but with a long delay while POSTing. However this is not everytime.

Hard drive was clean wipe and checked for errors prior to install.

 

[Mark56]

My earlier suggestion was not to look for updated drivers for the CD drive but to reinstall the existing ones incase they have corrupted, try what I suggested by uninstalling the drive and then reboot to re-install the drivers.

What is your boot order set to? Check that the HDD is set to 1st.

What test did you run on the hard drive, if you only ran the chkdsk /r routine then I would suggest you run the diagnostics from the hard drive manufacturers site.

Identify the make of your hard drive and then use one of the links below to get the manufacturers diagnostic for ISO CD. Burn the image file to a CD, boot the PC with the disc in the drive and run the diagnostics. You first need to set the CD drive to 1st in the boot order in the Bios setup.

If you do not have an image burner use this free software to make the CD.

http://www.isoimageburner.com/



ExcelStor: http://www.excelstor.com/eng/support.php?sub_id=3

Hitachi/IBM: http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/

Samsung: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/downloads/support_in_es.html

Seagate, Maxtor & Quantum:http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads

Western Digital:http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en

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Toshiba Fujitsu: http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Path=SoftwareUtilities#diagnostic

If you have a Toshiba hard drive I would suggest the use of the diagnostics from the Seagate link as this will work on all makes of drive and on any OS.

I would also run a check on the RAM by removing all but one of the RAM modules and try a boot up with each stick in turn.