My new box... no boot!

[gstuartj]

Hello all! I just built a new box for myself with 1 GB of ram, and AMD 64 3400+ cpu, and ABIT mobo, etc. My problem is that I can't get it to boot! I've fooled around in the bios for hours, and I'm getting sick of it. I've checked the MBR of my hard drive, and LILO is definately functional. I'm at my wit's end trying to figure out what's wrong!
When I turn my new box on, the bios does its thing for a while, then it gets to the part where its supposed to boot from the HD. It just hangs there for like, 30 seconds, then it says

Booting from CD...
PLEASE INSERT A SYSTEM DISC AND HIT ENTER TO CONTINUE.

Does anyone have any idea of what might be going on here? Thanks so much.

p.s. First person to fix it gets a lollipop!

[Dapper Dan]

I'm not the best Bios man in the world, and this may be a bit too obvious, but have you tried changing the boot order so your hard drive is the first boot device?

Check your boot order and make sure hard drive, CDrom and floppy are all there. If CDrom is the only one listed, your bios won't know where to go after CDrom.

[gstuartj]

Yes, my HD is first, followed by my floppy, and CD-RW/DVD.

[Dapper Dan]

Ewwww! Then I'm out of ideas...

Is it possible your Hard Drive's cable is on backwards? I've done this...

If floppy is set as second boot device, will it start reading a floppy after trying to boot from your hard drive?

[gstuartj]

Cables on correctly. It does check the floppy before going on to the CD-ROM, but it doesn't actually show any messages like the CD-ROM.

[Dapper Dan]

I don't suppose you created a boot floppy for you distro? If so, and it then finds your OS, that would eliminate a bad HD as the problem. Are you getting any error messeges, or any messeges at all for that matter when it tries to boot HD or does it go right past it?

[Stefann]

Eeeeeeekkkkkk, the Idea of an HD FIRRST in BIOS start-up order scares me, I had to fix that on my computer so I could boot mandrakemove it pissed me off, oh well, 'nuff personal stuff. Yeah I would agree, copy the boot image for your distor, well WRITE it I guess, to a disk and see what happens from there.

[gstuartj]

No error messages are shown. It just skips right past the HD and goes on to the optical drive. I have indeed been able to boot from the HD using a boot floppy/CD. (LILO and GRUB.) In fact, I'm playing frozen bubble right now! So, is this a sign of a bad hard drive?

[Chris H]

Is there a bootable partition on your hard drive?

<clutches at straws>

[gstuartj]

Here's my boot partition info. (Device Size Filesystem Mount Start End)
/dev/hde2 12.3 MB ext2 /boot 0 24