On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Russell Senior <[email protected]> wrote:
> > 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? > > > This is very similar to a boot problem I had last year. I know the solution was just to change a bios setting. I think it had to do with turning off auto detection for drives that were not there, but my memory of what I did has faded. Bill Barry _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
