Posts by Chaky

It is possible that you plugged ide cable to the motherboard up-side down. Have you tried Unplugging ide cable from motherboard all together? Any beeps?

Haloween

Solaris

Ocean's Eleven

(correcting my self)
Cute is the 1st word.
Others that follow are nice, smart, giving...

... to be continued.

1 word. CUTE!

Oh brother, where art thou

I was just pointing out that I'd rather do the traveling as a leisure than a necessity for hard work.

Omen

Therefore we are --> We think

Friends? --> enemies

Death becomes her

(It's a) same old blues again.

Whoops, I did it again.

In my defense, I'd rather be a tourist.

(because I'm) born to be free

That's the tourist-destination price of beer average.
$2 is the "industrial-destination" average. I'm a seafarer. Not a tourist.

Is your HD showing up on the post screen?
Have you tried to disable LAN, Sound and other intergrated stuff on your motherboard?
Is there a change of behaviour when you try old and new memory sticks (You did mention 0x0000007E before and 0x0000008E now)
New memory sticks could be incompatible or different than the old one. You should be familiar of the new mem. speeds and frequencies. Check the BIOS memory settings.

If you can get your hands on windows XP installation CD, try installing it. (clean install with all hardware plugged in).

If all this fails.. it is either dying cpu or mobo.

I can't verify exact steps for you (this program is not made for my mobo), but judging from that pic, the mistake is with the file name.
In the "load"line should be "A:\K8NSC939.F8"

Flags should be:
all chacked except "keep DMI data" and "auto"

When program starts you need to press enter, which makes no sense to me, because flshing utilities are sopposed to work without any user interaction.

I know (doh!) that you don't NEED windows to operate PC, but you NEED it to run 99% of software that has nothing to do with Bill Gates nor Microsoft, except using the platform. Therefore, you NEED windows to operate PC. I never once saw a PC game nor any piece of software in stores where I live that don't require Microsoft Windows.

Open minded? Bill Gates? For all I see, he is one greedy tight-ass TV selesman.

Explanation:

Tight-ass - 1PC - $100 tax to him. Made it trough copyright law. Let's not forget where the NT came from and how did the MS-DOS - 3.11 - 95 - 98 - ME streak ended. If he was so open-minded, he would make Windows free of charge and not necessity to operate PC. Not even a MS-DOS is free of charge (still charging $20 although it is obsolete). Yup, the ultimate monopoly.
Only drawback in that case is there would not be a LINUX response to his "open-mindedness".
Imagine paying Tesla $100 for every power socket in your home.

TV salesman - his EVERY interview I saw on TV (CNN's Larry King Live included) is about some product where he starts showing how inventive and easy-to-use it is. 2 words: TV salesman.

Greedy - How much money does that man need? 1 billion is more than enough for next 50 generations of Gates family tree. That is the amount that he is "generous" to put in that foundation of his. Keeping 50 BILLION USD!!!! Generous? Nope, greedy as hell. The greediest man alive.

Day after tomorrow

Here is what you want to do (this goes only if your motherboard is Gigabyte K8NSC-939):

1. Download latest BIOS
2. Unpack it on bootable floppy disk (it will overwrite autoexec.bat)
3. Delete config.sys on the floppy
4. Boot the machine from floppy and let it flash your BIOS. It takes a minute or 2. Do not interrupt the flashing process. If you do you will render your machine useless. Recoverable, but not necessary.

If you can't set your BIOS to boot from floppy due to inability to save settings, just unplug HD and CD drive, leaving your system no options but to boot from floppy.

This will make sure your BIOS is functional and not corrupted, like it seems.
If the CMOS errors appears again, it is likely that the CMOS battery is to blame. Replacing it would be my advice then.

Also, some modems are known to cause some weird boot behavior. If you are using one, try running machine without it.

259

F like, in hex.
(FF would be correct there)

You get man's best friend.

I put in a cat.

Glad to help.

I've been around the world and most common price for a beer (bars) is ~$2.

That configuration is not likely to happened because you need to set the partition "active" to be bootable and having more than one active partition will cause system errors. Only way I would imagine for this configuration of partitions to be bootable in true MS-DOS 5 is via MS-DOS 5 boot disk. Win98SE uses MS-DOS 7 and all system files (command.com, dblspace.bin drvspace.bin etc) are of different version than MS-DOS 5, so simple multi-boot with Win98SE would not be true MS-DOS 5, although it would virtually be the same, with difference of some program (and driver) compatibility. For instance, I had ISA sound card whose DOS driver wouldn't work with Win98 command.com, but would with win95 command.com.

Other problem would be NTFS and FAT32 partition (in)visibility in MS-DOS 5. FAT16 partition would be designated with drive letter "C" for it would be the only visible partition (NTFS and FAT32 partition will be considered as unpartitioned space while in MS-DOS 5).
While in Win98SE, "C" drive would be FAT32 partition, and FAT16 would be "D" drive. There is a NTFS support for Win98SE, but it is not implemented in the original installation. After installing the NTFS support, NTFS partition would appear as "E" and would become accessible. But all this letter shuffling would cause problems if you attempt to use same program installations for Win98 and XP, or MS-DOS and Win98.

To create such partition configuration follow these steps:
(reboots are …

There are several settings regarding HD mode and data transfer mode. HD mode are (usually) normal, large and LBA. LBA is the choice. Most systems have "auto" option that lets BIOS decide between those 3. If this setting is set wrong, you would get message like "Disk media failure" or "OS not found" etc.
Data transfer modes are usually PIO 0 - 4, MDMA, UDMA modes (33,66,100,120...) depending on the controller capacity. Wrong settings here would not manifest right away, but during extensive disk usage as data corruption, or just freezing the machine without any warning.

If you haven't changed BIOS settings for the HD, it is most likely that your HD is dead.

I suggest taking out the hard drive and sweeping it on another machine.

That is wierd behaviour. I can explain it only by bad drive. Only thing I can suggest to remedy the problem is to flash the drive's BIOS. For more accurate advice you'll need to provide me with EXACT DVD model. POST drives listing, device manager, or (most advisable) drive itself contain the model signature.

I have identical mobo an had a problem with one modem. I seems whenever I try to use the modem system reboots. No effect on the VGA, though.
I suggest flashing your BIOS to latest non-beta version with this tool and setting it up on defaults in BIOS setup.

This BIOS update is for the ASUS A8N-SLI ONLY!
Not A8N-SLI SE, A8N-SLI Deluxe nor A8N-SLI Premium!

You will have to be more informative.
Is it a laptop?
What optical drive are we talking about?
Does it open while windows are shutting down or after the PC is turned off?
Does it display any messages?
Is there any strange log entries in event viewer at the shutdown time?

You should check the CPU heatsink and it's fan. CPU overhaeting causes the system to shut down as a prevention of CPU getting melted. That can be triggered by lack of cooling.
It still can be faulty PSU, for only the CPU uses 1.4 V current. Fans HDs and most of the other stuff uses 5 and 12 V.

I set up the RAID with the Hitachi on RAID 0 and the WD on Serial ATA 1 (of 2) and it booted into the OS with both HDs connected.

This is not clear to me. Did you set up RAID array level 0 or by "RAID 0" you ment Serial ATA 0 channel?

If you ment Serial ATA, have in mind that you need to CREATE A PARTITION on a new drive in order to see it in OS.

If you ment RAID array 0... RAID arrays "merge" the drives together, thus making it look like 1 drive with combined capacity.

As I said, XP has problem with most SATA controllers, because the technology in newer than XP.

morally (i'm not religious) i believe it's wrong to take another life

practically wrong because too many mistakes have been made in the past and 20/20 hindsight is no good when the switch has been pulled

I agree. As they say, 2 wrongs don't make it right.

(and) Carpe diem, baby

Most likely that the faulty memory is causing this.
If there are 2 or more memory sticks, try running your machine without one to see if it is the faulty one. Repeat the procedure until you find which one is to blame.

Guy walks in a bar holding a big turd in both hands, showing it around and saying: "Look at what I almost steeped on!"

I'm not sure how possible is to install second HD into your notebook, but if it is possible, I suggest that you Install the 2nd HD, configure them so that old one is slave or master on sec. channel (anyway it will be the "D" drive), install the windows on new one and try to salvage any data if the hd is accessible at all. If it's not... sorry, no help. I did hear of some companies that spaecialise in data recovery from dead HDs but I have no idea how much they charge for it.

F

You can say that again.

256

253

This is COUNTING lesson, not multiplying (that is too advanced)

Halloween

Kangeroo Jack

Your HD probably developed a bad sector in the system area. That is what's slowing down your system and preventing it to read the disk properly. You should run the scandisk with a surface scan.

250

I like pie.

I'm not --> Junkie expression

Here is my advice:

Take a note of the BIOS version (it is displayed while booting).
If it is 1012 or 1.012 or 1012.001 or 1.012001 it is beta version.
Beta means work in progress - possible bugs. It is quite possible that the guys in store flash the latest BIOS-es as soon as one is published. Even beta versions.
If it is beta version, my advice would be to downgrade your BIOS to more reliable version 1011.
To flash it you'll need floppy drive and flashing utility.

Make bootable floppy, unpack those 2 files to that floppy.
Delete autoexec.bat and config.sys on that floppy and boot the system via floppy. You will need to change booting sequence in your BIOS (Floppy or removable first).
When booted type:

afudos.exe /i1011 /oBackup.rom

Do NOT interrupt the process. It will take minute or two to complete and will reboot or will prompt you to reboot. If you interrupt the BIOS flashing, you will render your motherboard useless. (recoverable, but unnecessary complication)

Same advice if the version is lower than 1011.

Anyway, windows should not notice the difference between 2 identical motherboards. Only possible difference between those 2 motherboards is BIOS version and BIOS settings. Memory change should not impact windows bootability. The old mem (333 MHz) is even less compatible with the new one (400 MHz).

If all that fails:
- go ahead with …

I don't understand the obsession with that line here. What is wrong with having that line? Why is it bothering so much ppl (me included)? Why would ppl temper with registry and crash the windows in attempt to get rid of it? Why did Bill Gates put it there in the first place? Why am I asking so many rhetorical questions about that line?

Confused --> drugged