Boot Errors

[Seadog66]

I have been running for over a year, all of a sudden when I turn on the PC
in the morning it come up to a point and halts, "Boot Error, Put in system disc and restart". If I hit reset it keeps doing the same thing, over and over. However if I wait a few minutes turn the system off, and then turn it back on it will boot up OK. I have tried changing hard drives, three of them all do the same thing. I have a Pent III,500mhz,768 mb of ram,two hard drives and one CD drive. Any suggestions as to what the problem might be?

[Rexa]

Did u mess with any settings the day before? Installed anything new? Did u try booting with a disk to see if you can get into safe mode?

------------------
RUN AWAY FROM COMPAQS!!!

[Seadog66]

No, I did not mess with any settings.
No, I did not install anything new.
Yes I can always go into safe mode with windows boot disc.
In stepping thru the boot process, it appears that there might be a problem
with the EZBios as used by Maxtor in the setup of the hard drives, as that is the last thing called for before the Boot error, and halt.
I don't normally turn the PC off except when I am away from the house for extended periods of time, so I don't really know how long this has been happening. Several weeks ago I did a rebuild job in installing two new hard drives and an extra 500 meg of ram. Did not experience any problems at that time that I noticed. I had been running under Maxtor EZBios prior to that, but when I put in the new drives, I installed a newer
version of EZBios. ??? That is the only changes to the OS in the past two years...

[Seadog66]

One other tidbit of information. Using the "Reset" does not solve the problem, even after being on for sometime. However doing a cold restart always solves the problem???? As I said, changing out the hard drives does nothing, still same symptoms. So Conclusion must be it's on the Motherboard. Qestion now is, What interface does the Bios chip have with the EZBios s/w, since the error message is being generated buy the on-board Bios???? Is my on-board bios going south or need to be warm before it works?????