Help! PC will not boot!

[thistle3379]

Any suggestions are very much appreciated and please forgive my lack of knowledge!

I have a 6 year old AST computer w/Pentium 75mhz & 24MB of RAM. After buying a new machine last summer, this one has been sitting around. Occasionally, I would boot the machine up to pull off old files, but recently, the machine will not boot up.

When I turn it on (reading what appears on the screen), it goes through the AST Bios, tests memory (Pass 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, 24M OK), then runs some sort of IDE scheme (it says 5763MB, YES then does some sort of pri master- Maxtor, pri slave- none, sec master- none, sec slave- none...) then it hangs right there and will not go further.

Any ideas? I know this is an ancient machine but I would still like to have it working. Thanks!

[Chris P]

I have an old (486-66) machine at work that has a similar problem. If the power is turned off, the CMOS loses HDD info. We reboot to the BIOS setup, autodetect the HD and away we go.

[thistle3379]

I tried the boot disk, with no luck. You are correct- the hard drive is not original. A friend's brother replaced it for me 2 or so years ago. I remember when he did, he had to install something else to make the hard disk work... maybe a controller of some sort.

Here is exactly what is on the screen at the point where it refuses to continue, and this information is listed TWICE:

Sigg Enhance IDE Driver V3.10
IDE Scheme
Pri Master- 11166 16 63 5763MD YES Maxtor 90576D
Pri slave - none
Sec master- none
Sec slave - none

<repeated once>

I tried changing the settings under system setup with no luck. I changed the Hard disk adapter setting from "Auto" to "Add-in", and it could not identify the hard disk. When I selected "Built-in", it acts the same as "Auto". It gets to the the same point and hangs up.

Any ideas? Thanks for the help!

[johnqp]

Could be one of a few things - your boot sector for the hard drive may be corrupt which might mean re-formatting the drive and re-installing the operating system. Or the hard drive settings in the BIOS have changed possibly due to battery back up going down due to its lack of regular use, but usually you are given a checksum error if the battery dies and the system asks you to enter into the BIOS to fix it.
By your description it looks like you have a 5763 MB Maxtor hard drive set as the primary master. ....that size (5763 MB = 5.7 GB) bothers me a little. I'm not sure 5.7 GB drives were standard fare 6 years ago (any body else know for sure)
Which would lead me to beleive that the hard drive settings in the BIOS are wrong.
Any better ideas people? Jump in!

[daverme]

I think johnq has something. Try booting from a floppy, just to see if it will work. If it does, then try redefining the HDD parms in the CMOS.

[Lebo]

Chrisp

your problem is a flat battery, install a new one and problem solved.

Thistle3379

You are able to get into the cmos setup? Make sure that boot sequence is set to A: first, then try the boot disk, if you can't make that far you are in trouble.

If so take the drive out of the box, set it up as a slave and try to transfer the data to another disk.

[johnqp]

Hmmm - I'm not too familiar with proprietary systems such as AST. My college uses AST's and I will ask the IT people there for any clues. (They still have lots of P75's in action) I won't be able to get back to you until Fri.
It sounds like your friends brother may have had to install an IDE card, or a jumper... in which case the next paragraph won't count! Check to see where the HD data cable plugs into - the MoBo or an IDE card.
I'm not familiar with add on IDE cards but If it is an IDE card, it might be the BIOS and IDE card are conflicting over which gets to control the HD.
Try setting you BIOS HD selection to "none".
Good luck!

[KMBALO]

the settings must be wrong in setup if it's just hanging there, isn't there a cdrom drive, it's not detecting it, maybe that's why it's hanging.

[ragtop]

I think the other posts are probably on the right track. Looks like you have a SIIG EIDE controller card because the original on-board controller won't handle a 5G hard drive. When you have an add-in card, you have to disable the on-board controller so it isn't trying to find drives that aren't plugged into it - you'll need to go back into your setup menus to try and find the way to do this, either with a "disable onboard IDE" feature, or by setting all the drives to "none".

If this is the problem, it is probably because the CMOS battery is bad, but you will normally get a "CMOS checksum error" message when this happens. Then all your BIOS settings will get reset to default values. If you miss the checksum error message, the other thing you will almost always notice is the clock is reset and will no longer show the correct date and time. When you go back into your setup menu, check the time and date, if it is incorrect, that would almost surely mean the battery is bad.

If you aren't familiar with the CMOS battery, it is a small battery located on the motherboard. It is normally about the size and shape of a nickel. You can normally pop it out and replace it pretty easily, although a few OEM computers may have it soldered into the motherboard. You should be able to pick up a new one at a computer store, batteries plus, etc.

[thistle3379]

OK- I set the hard drives in the system setup to "none" and it still acts the same. The system clock is correct, so I assume the battery is OK. Maybe I should replace it, just to be sure? Also, it is set to check the floppy drive first, but it will not react to a boot disk in the A drive. (Lebo- maybe I am "in trouble"!)

I'll open the box this weekend to see if I can see anything... and then I may search the other posts to see about installing the drive into my other machine.

KMBALO- you said something interesting re: CD-ROM drive. Before, when it would still boot, it would not recognize the CD-ROM drive... which puzzled me. Maybe this has something to do with it? It is struggling to detect the CD-ROM? Sounds like a long shot...

Thanks to everyone for all the input. Maybe I'll get it working yet.