Old System POSTs, but not much there after

Hello All,

I have an older PC that is built from the following components:

Intel PentiumII 400MHz (not a Celeron) Slot-1 CPU
Abit VT6X4 Motherboard (onboard sound disabled)
(2x) 128MB PC100 SDRAM modules
Else Gladiac GF2 MX200 32MB SDRAM AGP Video card
Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16 ISA Sound Card
SigmaDesigns Hollywood+ MPEG Decoder
Western Digital 20GB 7200RPM on IDE1-Master
Sony DVD-ROM drive on IDE2-Master
Mitsumi 3.5" FDD on FDD controller

Ok, this morning I got up and the PC was working fine. I had XPpro installed on a Primary 4GB partition and Windows 98FE installed on another 4GB Primary partition. This was accomplished by installing XPpro first, then PartitionMagic Pro7, and PMpro7 used to create the other Primary partition.

This setup has worked for 2-3 months without a hitch, and today I created an Extended 5GB partition with a single Logical drive consuming the entire Extended partition. I used this Logical drive for a data partition, formatted FAT32 by XPpro's Disk Manager.

I then chose to reboot, but before doing so I used PMpro7 to set the Primart FAT32 partition (not the data partition, but the second Primary partition on the physical drive) to Active as I had planned on reinstalling Win98FE. PMpro7 did this and denoted it would be rebooting, which is did successfully.

Somewhere along the line of my formating and reformatting the now Active Primary partition (FYI, PMpro7 'hides' all other Primary partitions when the target Primary partition is set Active), which was after I verified using FDISK (custom boot WIn98FE cd) was 'viewing' the disk structure correctly.

Well, during one of the 3-4 reboots I would see the normal sequence of events ...

1.) Video card information display
2.) BIOS reporting version
3.) Memory Test
4.) Detection of IDE/ATAPI devices on IDE1/2
5.) Keyboard LEDs flickering indicating the option to enter the BOIS.

... and nothing else. Normally what would come at this point is that the BIOS would adhere to its configuration and attempt to boot from the first configured boot device, which at the time was the CDROM (DVD) drive, and if failing then the HDD0, and if failing the Floppy.

Well, this went on as the formerly bootable CD in the DVD-ROM drive was no longer attempted by the BIOS, the hard drive light (HDD LED) never flickered, and the Floppy, which had nothing in it, ran continuously. Strange, very strange.

I went into the BIOS and configured it as if no Floyy was there and tried a reboot again. Mind you by this time I cold rebooted several times. I checked the power and IDE bus cables, etc. to make sure nothing came loose. Now, the BIOS isn't even detecting the DVD-ROM drive, which is did previously (although power to it is allowing the tray to open/close, and flickers accordingly with something in the tray).

Puzzled I am. Anyone got a siggestion for this mystery?

Wow.

Can you get to any sort of boot failure message with all IDE devices disconnected?

I will determine this when I get home. Right now, I am at work. I suppose if I have to, this weekend I can test most of the components individually in another PC. I will not be able to test the CP, but I know its running.

Well, I do not know if letting the old PC sit there all night had anything to do with it, but this morning I disconnected both IDE1 and IDE2 buses and got a boot failure, which tells me at least the BIOS is trying to POST-handoff to a MBR on any appropriate bootable device.

I then powered it down and only reconnected the IDE2 bus, which has the Sony DVD-ROM drive on it. It was detected at POST and booted the bootable CD-ROM (WIn98FE). Powered down again and reconnected the IDE1 bus, which has the Western Digital hard drive on it. It was, now with the DVD-ROM drive, detected at POST, but this time an attempt to boot something never came. Same original problem.

Side note: I have this drive sitting in a removable storage tray. Thinking that this may be the problem (even so, the HDD should have been bypassed for the boot attempt on the DVD-ROM drive), I removed the hard drive from the tray and connected it directly to the IDE1 bus. Same original problem.

Ok, next I placed both devices (hard drive left jumpered as Master, but re-jumpered DVD-ROM to Slave) on the same IDE2 bus and, again, both devices were detected at POST, but no boot attempt was forthcoming. This is unusual!

Well, even if the hard drive was faulty in any way it should not preclude the DVD-ROM with its bootable media (Win98FE CD) from being given the opportunity to boot. Hmm. Another inspection of the BIOS (remember, I had reloded the Fail-Safe Settings) and found that the hard drive configuration set to Auto. Although this accurately (I think) reported the kind and size of the hard drive, it said nothing about if it were set to LARGE mode!!!

So, I went in and manually changed it to Large mode and saved, exited, and rebooted. Guess what? Since the BIOS was still configured for CDROM-->HDD0-->CDROM as the three-legged boot sequence, the DVD-ROM booted its media. Being surprised, I removed the media in the DVD-ROm drive and hit the Reset button. Great, now the hard drive is booting!

So, something happened before I loaded the Fail-Safe Settings in the BIOS. I know that loading those settings would cause the drive mode to not be LARGE, but could this have happened by some other intervention (virus)? I know that Win98 has the ability to toggle some features in a BIOS, but ...

Anyway, I can now pickup the pieces, but I am glad that it wasn't a bad hard drive, or anything else failing. Since I had not paid any particular attention to the time being reported just prior to the inceident, I do not know, or think, its the motherboard battery going south on me.

Ideas?

Well, the problem still isn't resolved. I took the position after finally being able to boot something to do a Nuke & Pave. I thus popped in the Win98FE CD into the DVD-ROm drive and configured the Boot Sequence in the BIOS to CDROM only. I then proceeded to boot with CD-ROM support.

I ran FDISK and deleted all partitions. I then created a single 4GB FAT32 partition and rebooted. Then, I formatted using the 'format /s c:' and waited. Then, I ran the Win98FE setup.exe and during the disk scanning phase it kept finding differences in the partition tables. In all instances, I had it corrected and saved to a file.

Win98FE installed but up initial login I found no DVD-ROM drive. Ok, this is unusual. BIOS sees it, setup.exe used it, but actual OS is blind as a mickey. Fine, I thought, and popped in my W2Ksvr CD and rebooted. Removed the only 4GB partition and allow W2Ksvr to reboot at the specified time (after formatting NTFS and installing setup files), and upon reboot complains that NTLDR cannot be found. WTF?

Repeated the last paragraph and the same thing happens. Ok, so something is amiss. Anyone know of something that can get into the MBR and not be corrected from an 'FDISK /MBR' activity? I tried this before attempting the W2K install, but this is only getting crazy. I wonder if the hard drive is simply failing.

Anyone have thoughts?

Bad harddrive................?

Well, I did think of a bad hard drive as being the culprit, but then other things started happening. For instance, a couple of times during the neverending rebooting the POST would come back with "CPU unworkable. Alter settings in the BIOS and try again." or some such crap.

The is an Intel P][400 which is a 100MHz bus using the 4X multiplier. To get beyond the above error message I dropped the CPU in SoftMenuII all the way back to 3.5X and 66 MHz (233 MHz) just to get it to quit complaining. After doing this I was able to get it back up to 4X and 100 MHz.

Although one would immediately suspect the motherboard battery, this board is only 1.5-2 years old. Still, it would not be entirely impossible for the mobo to go bad. I also wonder if the power supply could be causing these problems.

Since this is the only Slot-1 CPU & mobo in my household, I can only test the hard drive in another PC. I'm about to just chuck the PC and salvage what I can. What's the cheapest CPU/mobo/RAM available via an Abit/Intel solution?