On 12/05/07, David J Brooks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ok, so again today, the PC did it again. It worked fine for the first > two times, then the third hung up on startup. Just made it to the > intel splash screen. I turned it off, disconneted the power, waited > and tried it again. Still no go. I turned it off, then when i got the > dos start message hit f8. About 30-40 seconds later i get a dos screen > wanting to know how i want to boot up, bootable device, hard drive, > and something else. I hit hard drive and XP started.
So it's forgotten what to boot but when you tell it it to use the hard drive it works just fine. It must be the CMOS battery. > Does this give you anymore ideas what might be going on. Yep. The CMOS battery! :-) > If you feel its the hard drive, i quess i can get a new one installed, > and hope he can move the data over. If its the clock battery, when i > change that will i have to reset all my Bios and Cmos. Well, yes. Usually done by holding the F2, ESC or DEL key done before XP tries to boot. Might be another key combination, depends on the particular BIOS your machine uses (Award, AmiBIOS, Pheonix etc). However it generally tells you both this and the key combination, albeit briefly, during booting. And sometimes it can have got past that point by the time a old style CRT monitor has warmed up! Damn their black hearts. As a first step, somewhere in the rather old fashioned menu will be an option to set or restore "defaults". That's a safe option that will get things working. More fiddling will get more speed out of the PC. We'd probably need to know the motherboard make/model to help further. If you can get XP booted, then there are utilities out there to extract the BIOS string (google?) Eric. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
