Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 02:31:18 -0400
From: Clinton Parker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: 100CT BIOS? Problem - Question
A very strange thing happened to my 100CT yesterday and I am wondering
if anyone on the list can shed some light on it. I cannot remember
everything that happened exactly, but this is roughly what happened:
I was using the 100 on battery and wanted the screen full brightness, so
I quickly went into the 'fuzzy light bulb' and selected Full Power, but
since I also wanted to have it suspend when I shut the lid, so I also
selected Suspend/Resume(Memory) Mode. I forgot to take it out of this
mode before I turned it off and turned it back on again in the dock.
Don't know if this contributed to what followed, but I suspect it did.
Later when I was using it from the dock, I noticed, when I was looking
at the Device Manager, that there were two IDE HD controllers (the same
one) listed. Both listed as working properly and one had the "Exists in
all hardware profiles" checked and the other did not. Thinking that this
should be 'cleaned' up, I clicked on the "Disable in this hardware
profile" option. This is where things started to go BAD and I am giving
my best recollection of the details. Right after I did that, the 100CT
when crazy (I cannot remember if I was requested to have it restarted,
but if it did, I said yes and what follows happened after that), so I
pushed the power button to turn it off. The only problem is that it went
into Suspend Mode (you know where it shuts down and the power light
blinks orange).
I didn't think much of it, but when I pushed the power button again, it
asked me for the password (I have one set on my 100) and then brought up
a blank screen. Nothing seemed to want to get it out of this (including
the reset button). So I pushed the power button again and it went back
into suspend mode. After trying several times to break this cycle, I
finally pulled out the battery for a minute, put it back in and pushed
the power button again. This is where it got REALLY BAD. That time when
the 100 came up, it said something to the effect of "Please insert
system disk and hit any key to continue...". It just refused to boot
trying this several times. So, I dragged out the floppy and a boot disk.
I booted just fine from this, but when I tried to access the HD, it said
that it was not recognized!!! That's right - it said I had NO hard
drive!! After rebooting a few times with some slightly different
options, I decided to try and reset the BIOS to see if that would help.
So created a BIOS install disk and reset the BIOS. This worked just fine
and Windows came up after that. I went to the Device Manager and there
was now only one HD controller and it was disabled (why?). So I enabled
it an restarted Windows 98.
Once again, the 100 would not boot off or recognize the HD! So I
reinstalled the BIOS (again!) and again Windows came up just fine after
doing this. This time there was still just one HD controller listed in
the Device Manager, but it was enabled! Thinking I didn't want to go
through this again, I decided to tell Windows to look for new hardware
(in case it really needed that second HD controller). It came back
(after quite a delay) and said that no new hardware had been found. So I
thought that I most likely had everything working again - WRONG. I wnet
to the 'fuzzy light bulb' and put it back into 'Boot Mode' and shut
down. What happened next was truly amazing.
I started the 100 again just to verify that everything was OK. Windows
came up, but started installing drivers for EVERY device on the machine.
It was like watching a full Windows install (even better since it was
listing everything that it was doing!). Driver after driver got
installed, but amazingly, after it was done, the 100 was perfectly
installed. It had the correct drivers running for all the devices
including the one that normally require custom installation after
installing Windows.
I cycled power again and everything came up correctly except for the
display which was now in 640x480 mode. I set it back to 800x480 (no
driver change) and the 100 has been working just fine ever since.
Does anyone have any idea what happened? I think the HD got disabled
somehow in the BIOS by disabling the HD controller, but not exactly sure
how.
Is there any way to access the BIOS settings without having Windows
running (i.e. hold down some key combination while booting)?
TIA
Regards,
Clinton Parker
**************************************************************
http://libretto.basiclink.com - Libretto mailing list
http://libretto.basiclink.com/archive - Archives
http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/portable/faq.html - FAQ
-------UNSUBSCRIBE-------
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?subject=cmd:unsubscribe
--------UNSUBSCRIBE DIGEST------
Use above but add DIGEST to the subject line...
**************************************************************
