IP-TEC - Infopeople Technical Service Archive: Strange boot, odd CMOS settings

Strange boot, odd CMOS settings

Whittier Public Library (wpl@quick.net)
Sat, 2 Nov 1996 09:42:56 -0800

We recently had to replace our hard drive on one of our Infopeople
machines. I'm confident that the old drive was bad, but some of the
behavior of the machine did not necessarily point to a bad hard drive
at the time. Now, with the new drive, we are again being visited by
that behavior. (Today's Halloween. I wonder...)

Briefly, the machine boots oddly. After the initial installation of
the drive, the machine booted properly, but very slowly. Netscape
(v 3.0) too, loaded and ran extremely slowly. A volunteer noted that cache
memory reported at booting (not the Netscape cache) was 0. We
adjusted two CMOS values and corrected the problem: CPU internal
cache and External cache had both been disabled; we enabled them.
Cache memory grew to 256K. The system booted, Netscape ran like a charm
once or twice.

Then the printer joined the parade. An attempt to print a JPG
document of moderate length (61K) froze the Netscape printing
apparatus. Every time we reset, rebooted or powered off and on the
machine hereafter, the printer spit out a sheet with one character.

Furthermore, the machine stopped booting properly at this point. It
would hang at the Starting MS-DOS stage. Or, it would follow
Starting MS-DOS with a handful of characters of garbage. The
volunteer and I disabled CPU Internal cache. The machine booted, but
operated very slowly. We enabled it. It wouldn't boot past Starting
MS-DOS.

At one point, after changing yet another CMOS cache/memory related
parameter, the printer began spewing screen dumps of the last BIOS
screen which details the system configuration: CPU Type, Base
Memory, etc.

My general question is, "Huh?" My specific questions are, "Does the
(new) hard drive have anything to do with this?," "Where can one find
a reliable discussion of appropriate CMOS settings?," and "What's one
to do with a hyperactive printer?"

Dean C. Rowan
Whittier Public Library