>>On 27 Jan 00 at 5:57, Mark David Roth wrote:
>>It's not doing me much good right now. there's something wrong with my
>>system. First I couldn't access hard drive 0, then I could only access
>>drive 1 sporadically when I booted off a floppy. Then it identified it
>>as C: drive. Now it won't let me access any of my drives at all. I've
>>tried three different IO controller cards so far A Compaq FDD, HDD,
>>serial and LPT card is what I was originally using. Then I tried an
>>AccuLogic sIDE 4/PLUS HDD, FDD, LPT, 2 COMs and game port card. Now I'm
>>getting desperate and I tried a JCC made in China, HDD and FD. The only
>>other cards I have left in my collection is a Acculogic sIDE-1, HDD,
>>with either a made in Taiwan R.O.C, FDD, for up to 4 floppies or a
>>Suntec FDC-400, FDD. I don't have much hope for any of them.
>>I think something is wrong with my CMOS. I finally just checked my
>>battery. It reads 3.6 volts on my multimeter. I think it's supposed to
>>be 6 volts isn't it? It looks like I probably need a new battery. Now
>>where can I find one of those? CompUSA says they can order me one. I
>>hope the right one. It's a simple plug in to the socket on the main
>>board. With my luck I'll probable have to make the thing up myself. Good
>>thing I have a lot of spare parts from my failed business. Sorry if I
>>meandered off subject a bit. If anybody hads any suggestions, I'd be
>>glad to hear them. I better quite typing I can't see my keyboard through >>all the
>IO boards I have
>>stacked up around it right now.
-Dale Mentzer replied:
-If you replace your battery and still have problems after you
-reconfigure your BIOS setup for your drive(s) then you might want to
-explore the possibility of some sort of CMOS virus (AntiCMOS, for
-example) that might be corrupting your BIOS when you boot. BTW, you
-can get CMOS battery replacment holders that use regular AA alkaline
-batteries and then you won't be needing to get any special batteries.
-I put together a 6 volt battery pack and hooked it up according to the
-instructions in the manual. Every time I turned the machine of it lost
-all the CMOS settings. It wasn't until I disconnected the battery pack
-that it would save the the settings during shutdown. Did I hook up the
-battery backwards or what. The manual said pin 1 6 volts, pin 2 not used,
-pin 3 and 4 ground. I attached the positive side of the battery to
-pin 1 and the negative side to pins 3 and 4.
I reinstalled the Compaq IO, FDD, HDD controller card. Ten I reset the
jumpers on the 540 drive, I haven't been able to access at all, to DS,
making it the master drive 0. I removed the jumpers from the 240 making
it the slave drive 1. Then I reset the BIOS to support that. Now when I
start up I still get the HDD controller failure message <F1>, but I
can boot off a floppy which loads DRVSPACE. Then I can access the 240
drive from that. But it's recognized as drive C:, which doesn't make
any sense to me at all. FDISK recognizes both drives, but when I try
to partition drive 0, the 540, it locks up on me and I have to do a
hard reboot. I also have a bunch of HD diagnostic programs that
recognize both drives but when I try to run tests on drive 0 I get
a lot of drive not ready error messages.
IO have a saying "When all else fails try the absurd". Maybe I'll
try hooking up the battery pack backwards, the negative to the 6 volt
pin and the positive to the two ground pins. The worst that could happen
is blow up my system. Right?
