Rather unusual problem...

[mjc]

Yeah, go figure.

Here's the problem...

Recently...as in the the past week, I have developed a strange problem trying to to boot to CDs. About half the time, the boot fails and the system restarts.

The problem is repeatable. Every time certain CDs are accessed, they will start to boot and then, part way through it is like someone hits the reset button. If I take the same CD and drop it into another machine, it will work perfectly.

Example.

Ultimate Boot CD...

Boots to the main menu, then allows me to choose anything/everything. From any of th esub menus I can choose a program, now about half of them will work and go straight to the program...even some that create a RAMdisk and transfer the working files to there...but the rest (like any of the hard drive diagnostics programs) fail.

Certain LiveCDs...Knoppix and Kubuntu (doesn't use GRUB for the LiveCD) work. Mepis and a couple of others don't. Try them in a different machine...no problem.

I've swapped the DVD burner's and DVD player's positions...so the player was the master on the channel and therefore the bootable optical drive...no change.

Swapped IDE channels...no change.

The only things that are diffierent from when it last worked...my main IDE drive is now pushing up dasies. And I moved everything to a new case with a new PSU. It is doubtful that the PSU is an issue...moved form a barely adequate 200W to a nice solid 350W.

This is a fairly old system...a VIA Apollo pro 133a chipset motherboard with a 1 G PIII. (OC'd to 1100..but I even dropped that back to stock and no difference).

The Benq burner is also fairly new and plays/burns/everything else...flawlessly.

One other clue...most of what seems to fail is using a boot image of Caldera DOS or GRUB...which also I am having fits with trying to configure correctly for Kubuntu to boot multiboot...I can isolate the drive it is on and it will boot...as soon as I put the other drives back in place...no boot, GRUB hangs...even editing everything to make sure that the drives are correctly mapped and GRUB knows where everything is.


MS-DOS, IBM DOS and FreeDOS boot images work. DrDOS/CALDERA don't. XOSL and LILO work...Grub doesn't.

[Paul Komski]

Long-winded troubleshooting ideas.

a) Extract a DrDOS/CALDERA boot image from a problem CD (using IsoBuster or whatever) and copy all (excepting the boot files) to a temporary folder. Add the same non-boot files back to a basic MSDOS boot floppy. Make a new Boot CD using the data files from the problem CD and the new floppy or floppy image file as the basis for booting it.

b) Create a brand new boot CD using a simple DrDOS bootable floppy image and see if you can boot to it.

Just a guess but if the problem is purely with the various different "makes of DOS" then all I can think of is that the memory management setup in any autoexec.bat/config.sys files is somehow astray or inappropriate for your problem system in the DrDOS images.

Could also be worth a try at using F5 to bypass the config files during boot-up and see if that makes any difference - but maybe F5 only works for MSDOS.

Grub v Lilo I don't have any sensible ideas.

[sburtchin]

I had a nearly identical problem. After adding a HD some CD's would boot always, others sometimes, and some almost never. After about two dozen cycles of switching power cables, and ribbon cables, and IDE channels, and Master/Slave/CS relationships, and checking voltages, and cleaning connectors, the severity of the problem just seemed to vary randomly.

The last time I had the case open NO connections were changed. Everything is packed very tight and the ribbons wanted to line up parrallel. I pushed the ribbons around to create crossing paths as much as possible. The problem went away!

Needless to say, I'm not touching those cables again until I have to!

[mjc]

Part of the problem solved...it was a video problem, of all things.

It seems that the Caldera DOS stuff was trying to use an incompatible video mode. Problem solved by flashing the video card..a GF4 MX440. For some strange reason the previous video BIOS didn't support all VESA modes.

Still haven't figured out the GRUB problem.

Paul, that would have been easy to do, had my primary drive not decided to take a vacation. But since I've figured out part of the problem, I think I'm going to hold off rebuilding the Ultimate Boot Disk...