Geek alert: old computer problems

Fand

Help requested, if you would be so kind, lads:

I’m meant to be playing around with a friend’s computer, which had a little lightning problem. It’s a bit of an antique (the kind of memory slots where you click in the RAM and then sit it up till it clicks true).

Now, at the moment it’s happily enough displaying its BIOS – Award Modular BIOS v4.51PG, and then later Award Plug and Play BIOS Extension v1.09.

It’s listing its bits: CPU type Pentium MMX, CPU clock 200MHz, bbase memory 640k, extended memory 15360k,

PCI Device Listing gives two devices: Device No 1 is an IDE controller, at IRQ 14; Device No 17 (???) is Display Controller, with IRQ listed as n/a.

Now, it *says* it sees a floppy drive, yet gives "disk boot failur, insert system disk and press Enter", and when I put a WinME diskette in (the only system disk I had handy) it just repeats the same thing robotically at me.

It doesn’t detect a hard drive – I’ve tried it with a couple of different hard drives, with a couple of different IDE cables, and with a couple of different power connectors, with the cable plugged one way and then the other into each of the two IDE slots – think I’ve covered everything, but maybe not?

Any ideas?

GoneShootin

Issue:

Disk boot failure.

Cause:

This issue could be caused by any of the following possibilities.

Boot options are not set properly in CMOS
Non bootable CD or CD-R in computer
All boot devices set are not bootable
Solution:

BOOT OPTIONS ARE NOT SET PROPERLY IN CMOS

Verify that the boot options within CMOS are set properly. Below is an example of how we recommend the boot options be set.

Floppy drive
CD-ROM drive
Hard Drive
Other / Network
NON BOOTABLE CD OR CD-R IN COMPUTER

Verify that no CD or CD-R is in the computer possibly causing the computer to attempt to boot from that disc.

ALL BOOT DEVICES SET ARE NOT BOOTABLE

If all of the above recommendations have been attempted and you encounter the same issue it is likely that the computer is not detecting any devices in the computer that are bootable. Attempt to boot from a bootable floppy disk.

GoneShootin

i had this prob myself on an old 486 i was fixing
i think all i did was to make sure that the info in the cmos about the hard drive was correct.

ie. cylinder heads, size etc....may not pick up hd on auto...
but prob is most likely in bios.

have you tried the hard drive in question with another PC ? ihave you tried deleting the primary dos partition and reformatting the hard drive ?

questions questions....

Kix

GS has pretty much covered all the bases but I think I'll throw in my 2p.

There's a very, very good chance that the boot floppy you have isn't up to much. I've noticed the quality of floppy disks is pi$s poor these days. Try it in another machine if you can. If it doesn't work, reformat it and create a new one. I can't exactly remember but I think that in WinME you can create a new system disk using the last tab in the Add/Remove program control panel.

You say that the system is detecting the floppy drive itself so it's probably OK.

Most BIOSes of that age have a "HDD Autodetect" feature. If the lightning just reset the BIOS, it should be easy to get it to recognise the hard disk again. If the IDE controller was fried you're out of luck, but fingers crossed it isn't. I can't think why the IDE controller would get it first.

K

po0k

Try going into BIOS, telling it to assign an IRQ to VGA, Auto-detect any hard drives, having ensured that the jumpers on them have all been set to the right positions.
On an IDE cable the Master Drive sits at the far end of the cable, the Slave in the middle. The Master Drive on your 1st IDE channel will be the one the BIOS will put the Master Boot Record on.
Double check everything.
If that doesn't work i'll post again later on.
Or someone with more time will. Either or.

po0k

Why do u call ppl with more education, technical wise at least, geeks?

Also, Gone-shootin, I doubt he'd have a CDR on a P200.

Stephen

Why not? My old P200MMX system had a CDRW

tribble

i can beat that - i had a 386 sx 20Mhz doing packet writing of cd-rw's in win 3_11 - but anyway back to the question ...

try updating the bios from the motherb. manufacturer's website, i know this isn't absolutly necessary because the comp. was working b4 but it may fix any auto detect bugs and maybe give you more detailed error messages as to what it's major malfunction is...
that's my 40 lira

Fand

Sorry, SyxPax, of course you're right: geeks are people who bite the heads off live chickens in circuses <poor chookies>, not kind people from whom I request technical help. But have you noticed that "geek" in the header line gets lots of answers?

I tried setting the BIOS manually, but it won't let me down to where the list of cylinders etc is in the hard drive detection, so I set it to auto, which it doesn't.

Gerry

Just because it says it has a floppy drive doesn't mean it correctly recognises it. Make sure the cables are connected properly, enable boot floppy seek in the bios. This will do a brief test on the floppy when the computer is doing its self test, and so you will know whether it is alive or dead.

It also sounds as if the boot order in the bios may be set to look at the c drive exclusively and not the a drive. Make sure the boot order has a: in there in front of c: . In the award bios this option is in bios features

To get the hard drives detected, you will have to set the ide controllers to auto detect in the standard cmos section of the bios setup. If the drives are over 8.4 gigs and the motherboard bios is extremely old, it may have problems, but hopefully that won't be the case.