computer problems

Your BIOS was set up to boot off the hard drive and it did. You should have set it up to boot off a floppy, considering you have a floppy drive. Next time, make a boot floppy.

For now, you're going to have to remove the BIOS chip from the board and get it reflashed somewhere else.

.....

First of all, if you are worried about viruses download the bootable antivirus checker disks provided by several of the antivirus software companies. I prefer AVG and it has found viruses that the others missed.

I fix about one computer a week these days by running the AVG standalone antvirus. :-)

Second, download a recent copy of the UBUNTU Linux distribution. One of the options is a standalone memory test. Only really bad memory fails the POST. Bad memory can pass it and then mess things up.

Third, if you have a BIOS virus, you are effectively screwed. Most modern computers have their BIOS in an EEPROM (electrally eraseable progamable read only memory) chip. You can update the BIOS "on the fly".

For a computer of that age, there may have been a jumper on the motherboard to allow or disallow it.

Most likely, you just messed things up.

To fix them, start by downloading the manual for your motherboard and the last version of the BIOS if it is updateble.

Each of the following steps needs to be done with the computer and monitor unplugged from the wall, plugged in to test them and then unplugged if you need to go on. I epxect you understand this, but I mention it in case someone else reading this later does not.

Then remove everything in the computer that is not permanent, all expansion cards, drives, etc. It's ok to leave drives in brackets, just disconnect the signal cables from the motherboard and remove the power plugs.

Remove everything that can be plugged into an expansion socket. DO NOT remove connections to switches, speakers, etc.

Remove the battery. Check the voltage. If it is a lithium coin cell replace it anyway. They often seem ok when they are not. Let it sit overnight before replacing the battery. If it was less than 3.3 volts, it's a cause of some of, if not all of your problems.

Remove all RAM.

Assuming you don't have a video card on the motherboard, turn it on. It should go on and do nothing.

Some BIOSes have "no memory" beeps, most just do nothing.

Turn it off, unplug and put in ONE memory stick (two if the manual says you need to and pay attention to where it says to put it (them)). You usually can turn it off by holding in the power button for 8 seconds.

Plug in and turn on. It should now give you the "no video card" beeps (probably 8).

Turn off, unplug and insert video card. Connect a monitor, plug in and turn on.

You should see the BIOS screen. You may see the video card BIOS message first.

If you get splotches on the screen, turn off unplug and try different video cards or memory sticks. It's most likely one or the other.

You can also (unplugged) make sure any socketed chips are in their sockets securely (slow even pressure, but not enough to break anything) and use a clean (no lead on it) pencil eraser to clean off the the contacts on the bottom of the cards and memory.

If it's clean, press the startup anyway option and it should attempt to boot.

If it's not clean, look in the manual for BIOS recovery options and follow the instructions.

If you can run setup, go in and turn OFF "quick boot" or anything like it, you want it to boot as slowly as possible (most POSTing and most messages).

If you get a clean POST, you can start replacing drives, memory, etc, one at a time until something fails. If nothing fails, attach an optical drive (CD/DVD) and boot from the Linux disk. Run a full memory test.

It's not perfect, it does not detect minor memory timing errors which will cause the computer to crash, but it will find almost all of the ones the POST missed.

Based on what you said, my GUESS from at least 6,000 miles away is bad memory, which can be caused by dirty contacts, loose chips, or even memory that is actually bad.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM
My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(

BIOS is stored in an EEPROM, so it can be updated. That allows idiots to write code that will damage the BIOS. Who made the motherboard, and what is the model number? Someone might have a board with the right BIOS chip on it. I may have a similar motherboard I can send you, as well. A P233 is win 95/win 98 grade, and I don't repair those computers any more. I get them donated for parts, and scrap them for hardware & scrap metal. Some of the drives are big enough for older machine tools, so I test & keep those and the CD-ROM drives.

A computer with a P233 should be new enough not to require the BIOS to be set up for a hard drive. Do you have a working computer running ME or newer? Buy one of the USB to IDE/SATA adapters to test them outside the computer. You can get them with, or without a power supply. That way you can scan the drives for any virii before putting them into a computer. Server & Linux suggests that it was running Apache, a free server platform and used for a web server.

There is a size limit for hard drives in the BIOS of older computers that may

--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

The first thing to do is get the machine to finish POST. To do this I suggest you zero out cmos, disconnect all drives, and try to get into setup again. To zero cmos you have to find the 3-post jumper near the battery. If you have the manual for the motherboard you can find it. If no manual, then look for a 3-post jumper near the battery. A jumper will be connected between two of the posts, say the left and middle. With the power off, connect the jumper between the middle and the right post. Then re-connect the jumper to the original way.

After this, with all drives disconnected, try to start the machine and go into setup. If you get into setup then set the time-date and find the option to set all settings to factory-default.

If you get this far you can try connecting your original drive only and see if the system boots.

Ive heard the term "reflashed" before. What is that? Lenny

Your BIOS chip is a flash memory device. The BIOS was flashed at the factory (i.e. the proper ones and zeroes were set in it). I suspect that those ones and zeroes are no longer proper, and the BIOS chip needs to have the proper ones reset into it, i.e. reflashed.

I once bought a "refurbished" (i.e. returned) PC that wouldn't boot. Although it apparently had the proper revision of the proper BIOS, I reflashed the BIOS from a file I downloaded from the manufacturer, and it booted properly.

On Sun, 16 Oct 2011 10:16:51 -0700 (PDT), klem kedidelhopper put finger to keyboard and composed:

Here is one well-known example:

"CIH, also known as Chernobyl or Spacefiller, is a Microsoft Windows computer virus written by Chen Ing Hau of Taiwan. It is one of the most damaging viruses, overwriting critical information on infected system drives, and more importantly, in some cases corrupting the system BIOS."

- Franc Zabkar

--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

Your computer booted into an unfamiliar operating system, and you were seeing lots of the normal boot things on-screen BECAUSE THE OS DOES THAT. Nothing wrong with the BIOS.

It's just a matter of booting from something (floppy, CD) other than the 'unknown' system, then all will look normal. Some BIOS'es are hard to enter at boot time (there's a few seconds when they look for a keyboard entry, otherwise it just boots up fast from the hard disk).

The good news, is that the boot process DID happen from the unknown drive, even though it looked odd on your screen (probably your computer had the wrong hardware to satisfy the boot-time sequence on that hard drive). Maybe the screen gibberish means the video card driver was not autoidentified, and the freeze was because you didn't log in.

Ancient MB. Get something up to date.

My guess(tm) is that your BIOS and MB are fine. What you probably did is connect the 2nd hard disk to the first IDE cable, without setting the jumpers on either your original drive, or the used drive. The result is that it won't boot. In that state, it will also fail to display the BIOS screen, as it will be waiting a long time (about 5 minutes) for the drives to come ready, before showing the BIOS. Your description would be more useful if you would describe what actually happens when you turn on the machine, rather than what doesn't happen (i.e. doesn't boot, won't show BIOS, etc).

Also, reversing the ribbon cable connections to the drives are possible. In some really early machines, that would blow up the IDE controller on the motherboard. If the drive is really mangled, with a short between the +5V and +12V lines, it's likely that you just applied +12V to the motherboard +5V bus, which tends to blow things up.

If you want to continue this excercise, be sure that your main drive is backed up. Also, either use the 2nd IDE controller and cable to test drives, or do what I do, which is to use a USB to IDE cable, and format it via the USB port. They're about $5 on eBay. Plan on blowing up a few of them as drives with a short between the +12v and

+5v are likely to blow up the adapter.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Right now there is no drive in the machine. I'm just trying to see if I can go through post. The "'drive seek" doesn't seem to happen either so "A" drive is not happening during the boot attempt. If I can just get into bios again I would try to select that from the advanced menu and see if it makes a difference. If I can get to an "A" prompt on a diskette with Format and F disk on it perhaps I'll have a shot... Lenny

Remove CMOS battery to reset everything. You may need to also temporarily move a jumper to do the CMOS reset.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

I was going to keep my nose out of this, but I'm so thoroughly confused that I have to butt in.

What are you trying to do? Test the drives? If so, this seems about the worst possible way. It would make more sense to set these drives as slaves and boot them on a known-good computer (as someone else suggested). Even better, if they're IDE-ATA drives, you can mount them in a box with a USB interface, and simply attach them to a running machine.

What is the question you're asking? I suspect it's the wrong one.

hat

s

William Thank you for "butting in". I appreciate everyone's input, yours included. I thought that I was being very concise. However I have to ask seriously did you read the OP? And if I did follow what you just suggested how would that have prevented a CMOS virus, if that's what this problem is? But to address another question I have why would these engineers in their infinite wisdom write a bios to anything other than a non writable eprom. It would seem like some things should be sacred. Lenny

Because BIOSes need to be updated fairly often. New hardware comes out, things are improved, bugs are found.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM
My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(

On Oct 17, 6:45=A0am, klem kedidelhopper wrote: > On Oct 16, 8:22=A0pm, "William Sommerwerck"

What William suggests is something I and many others have done many times without problems. I saw a computer (not mine) that was so infected the processor was 100% busy and would do nothing useful, including running a virus scan. Of course they needed to salvage the apps and data and couldn't just re-format and start over. The drive was first slaved into a good machine and subjected to a virus scan. Remember those pesky viruses have to execute to become active. The slave drive executes nothing during boot so activates nothing (unless the boot drive has its own viruses). That's when I became convinced about Norton utilities. Norton wouldn't dump a virus because it was running. AHAH, I'll boot into safe mode and kill it before it's running. Norton (at least that version) will not run in safe mode. I don't have Norton.

As far as booting from unknown drives, I wouldn't even attempt that. The OS installation gets tweaked during install for the hardware on the machine. Who knows what the original hardware was?

I also had a machine with a BIOS bug that was fixed with an update. It was FLASH so I didn't have to get a new BIOS chip and install it though one time I didn't follow the procedure EXACTLY and corrupted the BIOS. That machine was old enough to still have a socketed chip and it 'only' took $30 and a few days wait. My current Gigabyte boards all have dual flash BIOS chips. If you foul up a BIOS update (and I did THAT once too) it defaults back to the known good one and boots back up and yes, you can copy the current BIOS to the backup. The Gigabyte boards will now update the BIOS online while running Windows. That is about the easiest. I would think that a BIOS virus would be harder to write as it would be specific to a board model. Or do all the BIOS writes behave identically?

G=B2

confused that

the

slaves

Even

USB

I am Not William, but item by item:

I have. You were fairly clear. I think your BIOS got whacked.

Definitely. If you never execute code from the used drive it cannot transmit a virus to your "clean-up" machine. Big difference in not = trying to boot from it.

Cost. Cost. Cost. Availability. Mask ROM is prohibitively expensive in the storage sizes used for BIOS these days, flash is much cheaper and has the feature of being updatable. The updatability feature has fixed problems on two mainboards i have had.

?-)

--=20 JosephKK

I noticed something else now. If I leave the computer off for example overnight, the next day it will let me get into bios only once. I can change things and exit and it appears to save the changes. However on the next attempt to access bios, hitting DEL during the period where the RAM is counting up will not get me into bios again. It just gives me a black screen. This "once only" thing has repeated several times with the same end result. And my changes aren't appearing to work either. Tthe last time I did this I changed the boot sequence to floppy then IDE0 and I enabled floppy drive seek. When I exited and saved, it did seem to do those things, and then on subsequent attempts it just goes to a black screen again. So it does appear that the bios is screwed up somehow. Now here is another interesting thing. The working computer I have with all my important customer files seems to have the same bios chip in it. Both chips have a yellow and blue label that covers about 2/3 of the top of the chip. The label reads: BURN- IN and under that: 24HRS. There is a smaller white label on the other side of the top of each chip. The chips read as follows:

Possible corrupted chip: Chip in working computer: AMIBIOS AMIBIOS

586 1985-95 586 1985-95 American American Megatrends Megatrends D167887 D174223

If I had to guess I would say that these bios's are identical, however I don't dare mess with that good one. Does anyone have any suggestions or perhaps if there was a way to copy the good bios to my bad machine? I don't know how I would ever install it though. I just don't want to do anything that could possibly harm my good machine. Thanks, Lenny

This didn't display as I thought it would. This is how the two chips should look:

Possible corrupted chip:

AMIBIOS

586 1985-95 American Megatrends D167887

Chip in working computer: AMIBIOS

586 1985-95 American Megatrends D174223

Sorry but the system formatted my script. Thanks Lenny