Greetings!

I started up the computer I built for the first time, and it actually started to work. Power lights went on, all the fans were running and I saw it going through the memory check. I pressed DELETE to go into the BIOS settings. I set up the BIOS, saved the settings, and it returned to the memory check. It completed the memory check, recognized the CD ROM drive, then it accessed the floppy drive with the boot disk. The floppy drive light came on for a few seconds. Then the computer went to the System Configurations screen and it stopped. It showed some data and right below that was a blinking cursor. Here's how it looked:

CPU type: Cyrix MII
Co Processor: Installed
CPU Clock: 300
Base Memory: (blank/no reading)
Extended Memory: (blank/no reading)
Diskette Drive A: 1.44 3.5
Diskette Drive B: NONE
Pri Master Disk: LBA, MOD4
Pri Slave: (blank/no reading)
Sec Master: (blank/no reading)
Sec Slave: (blank/no reading)
Display Type: (blank/no reading)
Serial Ports: (blank/no reading)
Parallel Ports: (blank/no reading)

So, I'm stuck at this point. I originally had the hard drive connected to the Master controller and the CD ROM drive to the Secondary controller. I tried it a second time without the CD ROM drive connected, but the same thing happened. Could this be a floppy drive problem or a hard drive compatibility problem? I'm using a 40gig Ultra ATA 100 drive. The motherboard is a FIC VA-503+ with the VIA Apollo MVP3 chipset. It's interesting to see on the Pri Master Disk reading that it's not showing the size of the drive and there's no cache size reading... Any advice on this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Steve

Do you get a drive number before the blinking cursor?

What sort of boot disk do you have?

Are you able to access the a: drive after booting?

What brand of hard drive do you have?
Is it formatted? Many hard drive manufact. have a utlility that will help you format and configure your hard drive.

Have you tried to boot with just the video card, floopy and cd rom attached )-no other cards or hardware?

Do you have a cd rom/floopy with via drivers for the board?

I would start by RESEATING the RAM in your computer. It sounds like a RAM problem to me. If you are planning to put Win98 on this system, I would encourage you to also consider Win95 ver.B. It is faster than 98 and works better with the Cyrix MII cpu.

------------------
Will XP save Me ?

Thanks for your help! Well, I went into the BIOS settings tonight and changed a few things around. Set all the drive detects to AUTO again. I reseated the RAM and also changed the jumper setting on the CD ROM drive to MASTER, since it's on the secondary controller by itself. So, now when I start the computer it goes through it's memory check completely, hard drive light goes on for a second, the floppy drive is accessed and then the computer detects all the drives! EXCELLENT! After this it goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left of the screen. The keyboard won't respond to the cursor.

Answers to danleff's questions:
*There is no drive number at the cursor.
*I created the boot disk from the A format/copy system files menu. I also added some additional files: fdisk.exe, format.com, regedit.exe, Uninstall.exe, sys.com, scandisk.ini, chkdsk.exe, and attrib.exe
*The A drive is accessed when it first tries to boot up.
*The hard drive is a Maxtor 40gig ATA 100 5400rpm
*The hard drive came with it's own boot up software. (Didn't work?)
*I tried to boot with just the video card, floppy and cd rom attached )-no other cards or hardware. It just said Primary Drive not found.
*I do have a CD rom that I believe has drivers for the board.

So, do you think I'm progressing in the right direction? It kind of looks like data from the floppy isn't being read. Perhaps a bad floppy drive connection, or a bad floppy drive. RAM problem? Did I create the boot disk properly? What's the difference between a boot disk and a start up disk? I saw that a start up disk can be created in the add/delete programs menu of Win98.

Thanks, Steve

Welcome, Steve! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

Newsflash! Newsflash! A PC does not require an HD to start or run -- they did so
quite nicely with only floppy drives for years. Disconnect the HD and CD power and data cables.

Put floppy disk in A: and power up. If it starts, you know it's not the mobo, RAM or video card
causing the problem. If it does not, make sure the boot floppy will boot a different PC. If not,
make a good boot disk, and go back and try again on the first PC.

I suspect the HD is too big for this system to recognize.

Did you buy the motherboard and CPU as a combination?
New or used? If used, had they ever been part of an operating PC?
Does the mother board have on board cache? If so, is it enabled?

------------------
"I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage, mathematician, computer pioneer, analytical engine designer (1791-1871)



[This message has been edited by tjaymadison (edited 05-06-2001).]

I agree. The hard drive my be too big. Quantum (Maxtor) has a disk manager 2000 software package that will help overcome the drive size limitation and configure the drive for the system (may require the drive to be partitioned in order for it to overcome the size limitation). It will make a bootable disk that will allow the software to configure the drive from the a: drive. It can be found at http://www.maxtor.com/Maxtorhome.htm.

Under product support/software & utilities.

What do you think tjaymadison?

Oops! This is a Maxtor drive, not a Quantum. The software package is called MaxBlast Plus for the Maxtor drive.

Just saw a Newsflash! These babies will start without a hard drive. Let's give it a try...

So, like tjaymadison said, I disconnected the power and data cables from the hard drive and CD rom. I put in a new start up disk in the floppy drive and started it up. It went through it's memory check, accessed the floppy drive, showed no drives were detected through the controllers. Then it went to that black screen with the blinking cursor in the upper left of the screen. The keyboard would not respond to the cursor.

*I made a new start up disk and verified that it was working on a Win98 computer.
*The Motherboard and CPU are new - all the parts were bought separately
*All cache settings have been enabled in the BIOS/CMOS settings

I tried it a second time and it went through it's memory check, showed no drives were detected through the controllers, and then it showed an error message: "CMOS checksum error - defaults loaded"

When the hard drive is connected, it does recognize the drive in the first start up screen (POST?). It also recognizes the hard drive in the BIOS/CMOS settings. I do have the MaxBlast Plus start up software that came with the drive.

I am tempted to go out and buy a new floppy drive, since the one I'm using is very old. It also has some jumpers on it with "unknown" settings. But, I can hear the drive running and the drive light goes on when it is accessed.

So, it looks like I've narrowed the problem down to just about anything! Any suggestions on where to go from here?

Thanks, Steve

On the floppy drive, are there jumper pins marked DS0/DS1 or DS1/DS2? If so, and you only have
the one floppy drive, set the jumper shorting block on the lowest number of the two. Have you
double-checked that the floppy data cable is correctly oriented at the motherboard connection
and at the drive itself? The colored stripe must go to the pin marked 1 (one). And if the cable
has connectors for two drives, be sure you use the one at the far end, after the 'twist',
to hook up to the drive. You shouldn't have to worry about both these things at the same time,
because the twist is supposed to eliminate having to set jumpers, but who knows sometimes.

Next, remove the CMOS back-up battery for ten minutes, then replace it and power up with floppy disk in drive.

Two new questions ---

How much RAM installed?
If your board has a jumper to set the multiplier, which one is it set on?

------------------
"I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage, mathematician, computer pioneer, analytical engine designer (1791-1871)



[This message has been edited by tjaymadison (edited 05-06-2001).]

Wow, this computer just will not boot! I tried setting the jumpers on the floppy drive, but that didn't help. I checked all the floppy drive connections and reseated the RAM again. At one point there was no video and the computer just kept beeping. I corrected that problem. Now it's doing the same thing - it will go through it's memory check, recognize the drive controllers, and then it goes to that black screen with the blinking cursor. I've also noticed that the memory check only counts up one time now. Before it would go through the RAM count three times before continuing, if that makes a difference. I even tried booting off the CD rom, but that didn't help either. Now I'm thinking maybe it's a CPU problem. It does recognize the CPU at POST. Maybe this isn't the right CPU for this board - it's a Cyrix MII 300-66 CPU. I'm using 128RAM and the multiplier is set at 3.5. But, the motherboard manual said this Cyrix CPU would work on the board. Now I'm wondering what I should look for next?

Thank you, Steve

Rail and curse at the marketing geniuses at Cyrix/IBM.
That chip only runs at 233MHz, regardless of how many
times they stamp 300 on it, some fictional equivalence
or "performs at the same level as" number anyway,
created by some benchmarking wonk who 'determined'
that the Cyrix MII executes instructions as fast as
the competiton's real 300 MHz chip does. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/mad.gif

---------------

Now that I've gotten that out of my system, let's get back to yours. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

Power down

Set the multiplier jumper at 1.5

Power up, with start up disk in A:

Immediately go into BIOS setup

Select CPU speed to be 300MHz. You may have to nose around in the pages or options to find it.

Save changes and exit.

EDIT -- It worked for a friend of mine. Don't ask me why. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif
-----------------------

As to getting the drive to work, unless VIA, Award or AMI has some geek
genius hidden in a closet somewhere, I can't imagine a BIOS/chipset
combination of that vintage supporting a hard drive as big as 40G,
or supporting anything past ATA-33 off the mobo IDE controllers.
In addition, if Maxtor pre-enabled ATA-100, you can only disable it
by running some program they supply, for which you need a system that
starts up, obviously. So far I'd say we're up to Catch-21 by now.
I seriously doubt you'll ever be able to run that drive at anywhwere near
its potential on your present system without a separate PCI controller
card, and maybe not even then. If BIOS upgrades and driver updates were
abandoned for your chips, you may stuck at either the 8GB or 32GB limit,
unless the Maxtor MaxBlast software can install the overlay to let
you use the drive. Even so, you may still be stuck between a rock and
three hard places -- the BIOS, the chipset and IDE controller, and the OS.
See this section (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/over.htm) of The PC Guide.

------------------
"I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage, mathematician, computer pioneer, analytical engine designer (1791-1871)



[This message has been edited by tjaymadison (edited 05-07-2001).]

Well, this situation was starting to depress me. You know, collection all those computer parts for the last six months and wondering why this computer wouldn't boot up. It was 3am, and after five hours of trying to get the computer to boot, I almost gave up. Feeling very tired and sad, I decided to look at the CMOS settings one more time. Looking at the Chipset Features Setup page I decide to change the Linear Burst option to disable. This option only shows up when a Cyrix CPU is being used. Then I tried to boot the computer one last time. I didn't even look at the monitor this time, because I just knew it would hang again right after the post screen. Suddenly, I heard the floppy drive being accessed. This time the floppy drive sounded quiet and smooth - not like before where it made a grinding noise... And there is was - BOOM! The computer was loading the Windows 98 start up utilities from the floppy disk! Amazing! I went right into partitioning and formatting the hard drive. I then loaded Win98. Before I knew it, I had an actual working computer! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif So, it looks like the problem here was with the Linear Burst option in the CMOS set up. But, who what of known - I'm the only one in the world still using Cyrix CPUs! Well, at least I have a working computer now. I've proved to myself that a computer can be built with new and used parts! There are still some minor issues with the OS and sound card, which I will address in the appropriate forum, but the computer is working!!! Thanks to all of you who helped with this problem! I'm sure I'll be back for some more advice!

Thank you, Steve http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

OOO RAH FOR YOU! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif It's been a long, hard road for you I'm sure. It just goes to show you, it's always something. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

------------------
"I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage, mathematician, computer pioneer, analytical engine designer (1791-1871)