I recently encountered an ancient P3/Celeron 1GHz-ish motherboard that is having trouble booting. I get the initial splash page with the power-on self-test, then the screen blanks and I get a blinking cursor in the upper left. If I enter setup (with F2), it takes about 60 seconds of the blinking cursor before the setup screen appears. If I don't enter setup, after a long delay in some cases I get the initial part of the GRUB boot up, but it seems to go more slowly and usually hangs.
I have replaced the box's power supply with a brand-spanking new 400W one, also replaced the hard disk. That seemed to help for a week or so, but symptoms are back now. I've disconnected the CDROM and floppy drives (they weren't being used anyway). I have found one sequence that *seems* to work reliably. If I enter setup on the first boot attempt, then F10 to save and exit, after the associated reboot, the GRUB menu comes up and it boots the OS just fine. At one point, the harddisk booting had disappeared from the Boot Order options, and all I got was a PXE boot attempt. It wasn't obvious why that had disappeared, and it had booted successfully before I touched it (was running when I arrived), and I had not touched that setting. If it was the CMOS battery, I would expect more obvious clock problems or warnings. Any ideas? -- Russell Senior ``I have nine fingers; you have ten.'' [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
