boot-up problem: CMOS bad ?

[xzhou69]

I have a Pentium 166 MMX system bought on 1997. Award BIOS: 04/15/97. MB: i430TX. 64MB ram, 2.5GB HD. I had added a 13 GB HD as the MS and left the old 2.5GB as SL last year.

Recently I bought a Diamond MX400 sound card to replace my broken one, and it caused Windows 98 unable to boot to normal mode. I doubted it's conflicting with the internal modem, USB boards, COM1(for Palm PC link use) or COM2 (PS/2 mouse). I tried to resolve the problem in the Windows safe mode, but couldn't resolve it. So I finally decided to reload Windows 98 on my old 2.5GB HD. So I unplugged the 13GB and set the 2.5GB jumper as MS and then I went into the CMOS SETUP program. I tried to let the system auto detect the old HD, since I didn't write down the parms of the old HD. But it failed - when I saved and exited from SETUP, it displayed the msg that no HD found. So I shutdown the system and cold rebooted the system to try to enter the SETUP again. This time, it hanged after displaying the line "Pentium MMX run at 166 MHz", and even didn't do the memory testing. pressing DEL key did nothing to let me enter the SETUP.

Is my CMOS suddently corrupted? Or something else was wrong? I have done such procedure of setting up the HD auto detction before. It worked fine. Yesterday, it just suddently failed and couldn't even boot to the stage of MEM testing.

Any suggestion would be very appreviated.

Joe

[spaceAlien]

Off the top of my head --

Can you set jumpers or remove CMOS battery to reset CMOS?

Check for loose boards, connectors, smoke, flames...

Double check jumper settings on HDD...

Remove all other IDE devices

Any "beep" tones?

later...


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.sig file here

[Randy_tx]

The MOST likely culprit is the new sound card......take it out of the computer (with power cord REMOVED of course) and see if you get a good Post up........then we can go from there....

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"As hard as a rock & dumb as a brick"...Windows CEMeNT

[BigBlue66]

I agree that the sound card is probably to blame.

I'm thinking the problem with the harddrives is due to disk drive overlay software, since you say you had a 13gb harddrive in there. That year of bios won't support that size harddrive, so you must have had to use software that came with the harddrive to bypass the onboard bios.

I agree that clearing cmos, however you can do it, should solve the problem with the harddrive being autodetected, in case you still want to make the smaller one master. Otherwise, remove the soundcard as suggested, install the 13gb drive back as master and see what happens.

Good luck.

Big Blue 66

[xzhou69]

Thank you very much for your valued suggestions.

I've tried the followings:

Unplugged all other boards, except the Video.
Cleaned the inside of the system.
Reconnected almost all the cables.

None of the above really helped.

Then I replaced the battery. It worked. But I checked the old battery, it's still good (amazing, after 4 years). There's no leakage around the battery. So I put it back. Now it's working fine. But I still think the problem is on the battery. Probably it's dirty. Anyway, I'm happy that my system is up again.

I reinstalled the Windows 98 and there is no conflict due to the sound card. Dealing with the 13 GB HDD with the old BIOS is really painful. Using HDD start up disk is not convenient.

Thanks you very much again.

Joe