Arrgh

[j.b.huntress]

I have been fixing a donated computer. The hard drive was hosed among other things. I got it to work off of another disk that had an os on it, but wanted to upgrade to a larger one I had here. The computer had win98 on it and I wanted to use a 98se I had. It seemed to install fine. Once I saw the other drive would work, I took the old one out and moved the location of the one with se on it to the front. It jams on bootup. Not always the same place. Sometimes it hangs after the video card shows up, other times it shows the keyboard, mouse and DVD. If I try to enter setup it hangs.) If it gets this far I get the following message:

"Invalid System Configuration Data - Run configuration utility"

That would be nice if I could get that far. What can I do?

[liambl]

Try resetting the BIOS. If that doesn't work, the CMOS batter may be bad.

[Cricket]

Originally Posted by liambl If that doesn't work, the CMOS batter may be bad.

The CMOS batter may be bad? Why, not enough milk?

Cricket

[liambl]

Lol, not sure if I like the sound of CMOS batter, but I wonder if it makes good pancakes?

But I think it was supposed to be battery, gotta get that biscuit crumb out from under my Y key.

[rjfvillarosa]

Originally Posted by j.b.huntress I I took the old one out and moved the location of the one with se on it to the front.

Are you using an 80wire or 40wire IDE cable? (what colour are the plugs on the harddrive ribbon cable?)
What have you set the jumper to on the back of the working harddrive? CS, MA, or SL?
What plug on the IDE cable do you have connected to the harddrive?

[j.b.huntress]

How do I reset the bios?
I am away from it now, I don't recall what color the plugs are, but it appears like the only ribbon cable I have seen for hard drives and DVD drives etc. (Other than SATA which isn't a ribbon cable. )
I believe I got it plugged back in the same way it had been. The end on the MOBO is not the end that has the two different plugs, so that should be okay. It is the ribbon cable that is roughly an inch and a half - two inches.

It seems odd that the battery would die at this point considering it seemed okay prior, but I could check that later I guess. Even with a boot floppy in the floppy or WIN98SE in the DVD drive, it never allows me to boot from them as far as I have seen.

The jumper is master I am sure. It worked fine when installing windows. I could double check that to make sure, but I wouldn't have thought it would have installed windows otherwise as it wouldn't see the disk without the jumper on (it had as a slave, but not when I put a jumper on when I saw it didn't have one at all on it. (Must've used cable select.)

[Cricket]

Originally Posted by j.b.huntress How do I reset the bios?

Unplug the power cord from the wall outlet and then open the case and remove the motherboard battery for about 15 minutes. Reinstall the battery and plug the power back in and then power up the computer.

Cricket

[j.b.huntress]

I'll give that a try and check in back here later. By the way, Cricket, is your name Christine and you were married to Danny Romalati at one time?

[j.b.huntress]

I unplugged the power from the computer end, took the battery out for longer than 15 minutes, put the battery back in and plugged the power cord back in and it still jams up. I took the battery back out and tried it in a device that also uses the same size battery and the device worked. So unless the device uses less power than what the computer needs, I don't think it is the battery.

I rechecked cables and see nothing loose. What can I do now?

[j.b.huntress]

By the way, I had installed a nic prior to reloading windows (while the old hard drive was in it), could that be a problem even though it was already installed when I reloaded windows? I'll pull it out and try if you think that is a possibilty.

[j.b.huntress]

Whatever the problem, the old hard drive will not work either. I guess I could try a new battery if you thought that were it, but it did work the other device (a digital meter.)

I might try replacing the hard drive cable in case that all of a sudden went bad.

What it does is the hard drive lights up, then eventually the floppy makes the normal noise,
and then it seems to get stuck after that. I did take the nic out and that didn't help.

[rjfvillarosa]

To be honest it sounds like both the harddrives have gone bad.
Do yourself a favour and try running the harddrive manufacturers diagnostic utilities on them.
What make of harddrive are they?

[doubledragon5]

Originally Posted by j.b.huntress I'll give that a try and check in back here later. By the way, Cricket, is your name Christine and you were married to Danny Romalati at one time?

don't know if that is a joke, but trust me that Hawaiian is no Christine, if he is he had us all fooled..

[j.b.huntress]

Sorry. My Bad. I associate Cricket in this way:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Blair

[j.b.huntress]

I am going to put the first hard drive back in its original computer and see if it works. If it does, then it and the cable must be okay and it is something else.

[WJWheels]

Originally Posted by doubledragon5 don't know if that is a joke, but trust me that Hawaiian is no Christine, if he is he had us all fooled..

After all these years... you been outed Cricket.

[j.b.huntress]

I removed the hard drive, tested and then wrote zeros to it using the manafacturer's program, made a new partition using fdisk, formatted, checked using the thorough option of scandisk, changed the jumpers back to master, reinstalled and tried again. It recognized the following things processor, ram, keyboard, mouse, fixed disk (the particular hard drive in question I presume), dvd drive and then the floppy made the boot up noise. It then jammed and said something to the degree of a message and to enter setup to see it. It wouldn't let me enter setup. Pretty much the same thing when I removed the battery from the motherboard, waited well over fifteen minutes and reinstalled the working and newer one out of my meter. The only difference is I saw that it said updating then.

Should I remove the other unneccessary cards, or what? What else can I do to figure this out? It will not boot from a boot disk or the windows cd. I only see one way that the power plug will plug into the floppy and I believe the dvd drive and all are right. If they weren't it wouldn't recognize them would it or the floppy wouldn't make the bootup noise, or am I wrong?

[j.b.huntress]

I installed WIN98 SE on the hard drive using another comptuer and it still won't boot from it (even with the floppy and DVD drives disconnected. I even took out every card but the video card and took out and reseated the memory. What else can I check for. I am so over it, but really need to get this over. I have never built a computer, but if I had the problems there that have turned up on this, I am not sure I would want to.