Strange problem with friends computer
One of the guys that works with my dad sent me his mom's computer to fix it if I could. He said something was wrong with the hard drive. Upon boot up, it boots to a screen that says no OS found on any of the devices. It is a old compaq amd k6-2 with 8mb on board video, 500mhz cpu.
I got into the bios and the only devices I can set up in the boot order is either the cd-rom or floppy, no screen to detect and devices are anything like that. Which I thought was very weird myself, there is no way I can set it to boot from the hard drive, so I thought about just sticking in a new hard drive and going from there, but the hard drive will be more than the computer itself, any ideas of what I could check to get this thing booting? I'm guessing It has win95 on it. Also I tried booting from a win2k floppy and also a win98 and no, go I get a i/o error when reading the floppy drive, and it will not boot from a cd.
I got into the bios and the only devices I can set up in the boot order is either the cd-rom or floppy, no screen to detect and devices are anything like that. Which I thought was very weird myself, there is no way I can set it to boot from the hard drive, so I thought about just sticking in a new hard drive and going from there, but the hard drive will be more than the computer itself, any ideas of what I could check to get this thing booting? I'm guessing It has win95 on it. Also I tried booting from a win2k floppy and also a win98 and no, go I get a i/o error when reading the floppy drive, and it will not boot from a cd.
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If so, look in aside menu area, lower right area, and look for an IDE Device Detection option. See if it can find HD.
Second, if it has non-mousebale interface, look at the IDE submenu (you will need to hunt for it, MAYBE in Advanced menu) and the Compaq can probably then detect the drive. If it finds it then loses it after 5-10 minutes off but has it after a warm boot, CMOS Battery is dead-- period.
If still nothing after that, best one thing to do is stick HD in another box after noting down mfr and getting a floppy disk archive of mfr utils and making a bootable mfr utils floppy-- for Western Digital, the archive installer for the Data Lifeguard utils will make one such. Floppy boot box, and run mfr utils on drive after finding it in BIOS if NOT WD drive-- Lifeguard's util set can probe IDe itself for most computers of that gen and more recent, adn can find drive when BIOS cannot as it uses direct to firmware drive calls and HAS to be floppy boot run to work right). Ntoe, to run utils, do NOT attempt to install Liofegurad for this application, you need to tell it NOT to install lifeguard, accept the license, and for Antivirus safety run from a writeprotected boot floppy and it will sigh and say it cannot write a log file, but you do not need the log file.
Note that WD 400BB SERIES HD will run on this box, although the BIOS will probbely only USE about 32 GIG of drive-- make usre they keep and reuse drive later, in newer box you will have a full size 40 GB in newer box-- how to have cake, eat too (eat now, recycle in this one hardware case). Cost shipped should be under $70.00 and BIGGER drives are unlikely to work WELL with this Compaq box-- done a few (maybe 15) this exact way. Right now at two-three palces I know, including NewEgg, the Caviar 40 GBs are CHEAPER than the closer Protege's, which ALSO work for this but will not be best for transfer to another FASTER box later.
If WD utils pass drive, then try a NAV run from CD and hope it was boot sector virused, and fix with a PM 8.0 or Norton Disk Doctor run from a Rescue Disk run (one made by NSW, preferably on a Win 98 or Win98 SE box).
John-- who saves such things for emergencies, and this is one reason I RUN 98SE on my Barton box, so I can make them at need with new virus defs. If used, customer will 90% or more of time end up with NSW on their box, LEGAL one.
John.
Indeed, or at least a problem with the BIOS. Might I suggest aswell, you disconnect all non-essentials like CDROM, soundcard and whatever, for testing purposes. Also reset the BIOS, remove the battery aswell for a few minutes.
Did your friend mention any problem with his system when it was last working, like an encounter with a virus or something like that? Power spike? a short? anything like that?
Try Ageek's idea of sticking the drive in another computer. While you're at it boot to Partition Magic (if you have it) and see if it finds a small (unknown) partition at the beginning of the drive. You can download the SoftPaq for the particular model from Compaq to replace a missing/corrupted one.
If you know which SoftPaq you need, but can't find it, let me know. One of my projects years ago was to download ALL of them (up through Y2K or so) and burn them to CD. I was working at a cheap-ass repair shop which had all of the techs sharing a single 56K dial-up connection, and I got tired of waiting for them, so I decided to give my (then new) cable modem service at home a workout. The owner thought it was very selfish of me to take the 40+ CD's I had made with me when I quit. Bastard.:shakehead
Spinner raises a great point - a boot sector virus would have wiped most of the bios as well.
Let us know how it goes.
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Source: Fox Newx