PCA Forums

I am running a Trinity S1598 V1.04a with a K6-III 400, 64 meg ram, a Matrox video card, and Sound blaster 16 sound card. Bios is Award Modular V4.51pg.

I went to start my computer, has worked fine for 5-6 months, and it hangs right before the screen that show it looking for a boot disk in a drive. The a: drive light stays on and also the HDD light is on. I can put in a windows 98 boot disk and it will let me boot to a a: prompt. I can not get it to run in safe mode or do a step by step confermation.

I changed the boot order to c: first and still hangs at same screen.

Any ideals??

thanks

Bill

remove all hardware except your video card, cpu and ram. then try again

Check you connections within the computer and make sure everything is seated properly as well!

Morphius

[Edited by Insane Morphius on 01-02-2001 at 02:45 AM]

try unplugging your floppy and booting again.

If he can boot with a boot floppy there's nothing wrong with the floppy drive - more than likely it's the hard drive. Sounds like it can't detect it and it's waiting to timeout. If you wait long enough (several minutes) you'll probably get a hard drive failure error.

If you boot with a Win98 Boot Floppy, can you access the hard drive? At the DOS prompt type:

c: {ENTER}
dir {ENTER}

If you get an error saying the C drive is not responding/available etc then something is wrong with the drive.

Things to check for:

- Loose or dirty hard drive controller cable. Pull both ends loos and re-insert. Swap the ribbon cable for another one if you have a spare.

- Check BIOS and make sure you have it set to AUTO detect the primary master drive (wouldn't hurt to have it autodetect all drives).

- Make sure the hard drive is still jumpered properly. Sometimes you can knock a jumper off the drive when working near it if they have a loose fit.

- Make sure the Primary and Secondary IDE controllers are enabled in BIOS.

- It's unlikely, but maybe the primary IDE controller failed. Try moving the drive to the secondary IDE port and make sure that the Secondary Master is set to Autodetect in BIOS. Many people don't realize that BIOS will boot off of either port. As long as there's no hard drive on the primary port, it'll boot off the first available drive on the secondary.

Hope this helps.

HEY HEY HEY, got this thing going, I forgot which code key I had used to load win98, found it in the back of the cabinet. Went thru setup agian and everything works. I lost all my desktop icons and shortcuts but as far as I can tell all the information is still on the hard disk. Time will only tell.

thanks for all the help and suggestions

kater1@midwest.net


check out some of the other advice I got.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview ... did=310986