//flex table opened by JP

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Scooter
07-13-1999, 07:11 PM
On my wife's machine (exact same as mine, but mine works) at power up, I get a nasty hang. It shows the video BIOS, then displays the CPU (PII 266), checking NVRAM....OK, then it clicks off the RAM and then it says "WAIT" (press DEL to enter setup. Then the BIOS logo fades away and the serials at the bottom disappear, just like normal. But then it just sits there with the "WAIT displayed for about a minute. Then it boots normally.

It started when I added a SCSI card and a burner, but removal of these does not help.

One other oddity that may be related - I go into the BIOS and go to HD AutoDetect and it takes a good 3-4 minutes to read the drive properly. After that it works fine.

I thought about FDISKing and formating, but it doesn't seem like this is the root of the problem, as the hang occurs before the HD type is even displayed.

I did run a Norton DiskDoctor with a throough surface scan and it found no errors. But when I ran Norton System Info and tried to benchmark it, it said "Cannot read partition information". This indicates I should FDISK, but will that also help my hanging at BIOS problem?

BBA
07-13-1999, 10:09 PM
Sounds like the drive formatting is not the problem, but drive detecting is!

This could be BIOS or hard drive orcontroller/cable.

First thing is to disconnect everything from the controllers and use a different IDE ribbon cable. If the problem goes away, add another device. If this makes no difference, then flash the bios, it may be a corrupt data area of bios.

The only other thing I would try if all this does not work is to substitute the drive for the other PC's drive to verify if that is or is not the problem.

BBA