A hard day's night....

For those of you who haven't, take a look at mccannrp's post below about systems that fail to POST off of a cold boot. I was having the same problem, so I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.

I had just reconfigured my entire system after a rather nasty virus fragged my Windoze98 registry, making the system unable to even boot. Post yes, boot no. So I got my brother-in-law to give me a (fre!) Western digital 6.4 Gig HD, and started to rebuild the system (NO, I will not ask him to get one for you! https://www.sharkyforums.com/images/.../2005/06/6.gif ). Once I had reinstalled windoze on the new HD (installing onlly the vid and network cards, so I could use DSL), I installed McAffee, and prceeded to scan the old HD for viri. Once done, I re-installed all my old software. At this point all op'd (that means operated) normal. Now that the system was stable, I decided it was time to install the video card. Note to Diamond sound card users: they DO NOT like to have their drivers installed manually. I found this out the hard way, as detailed below...

Note that to this point, I had lost no data - I was able to recover everything from it.

Now, just prior to installation of the sound card, here's a system snapshot:

Cel 566 @ 850 (1.75v)
Alpha PEP66 chilling
256MB RAM (1 133 2-2-2, 1 100 3-3-3)
GeForce 2 MX
IBM 10/100 Network card
6.4GB Western ATA66 HD (Master)
20GB IBM Deskstar ATA66 (Slave)
Creative 52x CD-ROM
Sony 3.5" 1.44MB floppy

After trying to install the sound card (Diamond Monster 300), and having the system hang (due to various issues I'll detail below), I attempted to boot to safe mode to remove the partially installed sound card drivers (leaving the cound card in the box). Hung on boot due to an invalid system disk. My FAT32 table had been f*cked up, and after hours of effort, I finnally gave up trying to restore it. Pulled all the cards out of the box, reformatted the HD, put all the cards back in the box, and this time installed Windoze 98 with all the cards in the box at the time of install, and everything went fine.

The only problem was that I had not backed up my e-mail files, so I lost all of those (which is not a terribly bad thing, just very inconvenient). And now the system is running normally, except that it will not post off of a cold boot.

Definitely a hard day's night.

This post posted in an attempt to help catch up to the tech support board weenies.

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ForceTen
Quality - not Quantity

And thus the eleventh rule rule of Overclocking is born:

XI: Thou shalt kill flies with sledgehammers, whenever practicable.