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

Re: Strange boot, odd CMOS settings

Whittier Public Library (wpl@quick.net)
Tue, 5 Nov 1996 03:47:55 -0800

Norman (and list readers),

> Since everything was working before the hard drive was changed there would
> appear to be no problem with any Netscape or other settings EXCEPT those
> relating to the new hard drive. If the new drive is larger than 500+ MB and
> your Infopeople computer is like ours, the operating sytem will NOT support
> the drive unless you use special software. I would suggest that you
> reformat the hard drive, install the special software if needed - the hard
> drive manufacturer should be able to give you or tell you where you can get
> the necessary file, and then restore the all the files from the old hard
> disk (you do have a backup, don't you?)

In fact, "everything was [not] working before the hard drive was
changed." This has been a source of our frustration: prior to the
old drive crashing, these behaviors were in evidence. The new drive
is 540Mb, the maximum size of a single partition for DOS. Further,
the drive came with its own Disk Manager software which handled the
partition and format tasks, although I could have managed things as
you suggest following...

> As an alternative, using FDISK you could partition the hard disk so that no
> partion is greater the 500 MB.

As for this...

> In any event, before fooling with settings in application programs, I
> suggest you determine what is wrong. Monkeying with CMOS and other system
> settings can be dangerous or confusing to determination of the problem,
> unless you are certain that there is something wrong with those settings.
> If the settings are wrong, how come the system used to work OK? Have you
> gone through a step by step bootup to see where the trouble lies? Have you
> used MSD to see what it reports about the hard drive? Have you used a DOS
> floppy to boot without invoking Windows? Do simple DOS commands like DIR
> and COPY work correctly? And so on.

I am reluctant to "monkey" with CMOS; my originial posting begs for a
useful resource for describing all of the happy CMOS settings. I
haven't run MSD on the new drive. Good idea. MSD provided the first
indication that the old drive was dying. DOS commands work fine.
The problem, I think, is more delicate. Why, for example, when we
boot does the machine reach "Starting MS-DOS," then produce six or
seven "garbage" characters?

Thanks for the assistance. I'll keep troubleshooting. More advice
is welcome.

Dean C. Rowan
Whittier Public Library