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Boot up Freeze 1

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yamafopa

MIS
Mar 1, 2001
112
CA
This is kind of a strange one. I have just swapped out an old Delta CD from a PII Celeron system. The old drive would not read predictably so I thought it was toast. Put in a newer Acer Cd that I know works fine. Boot the system, play some disks, install some software and all goes well.
However when I shut down the system and then restart, the machine freezes. Just after the table that shows the basic computer configuration ( drives, cpu pnp stuff etc). The Windows 98 boot screen comes up, there is hdd activity and a light. Then all stops including the little status bar thingy at the botton of the splash screen.
The interesting part is this... In order to get the machine unfrozen you need to do a hard power off. Then you restart and you get the message that Windows did not start properly the last time and how do you want to boot this time. No matter how you choose to boot this time every thing goes fine. The freeze up only seems to occur if the previous shut down executed properly.
This seems counter-intuitive but has happened now at least 10 times without exception.
I have changed every software, firmware and hardware thing I can think of with no effect.
Any ideas or sympathy???

yamafopa!
 
I had the same problem. I fixed it by going in the BIOS and setting the detection for the CD drive to "Auto" instead of "CDROM"
 
Tried that as well as a pile of other changes in BIOS, all to no avail...
Today's testings seems to show that a 1 or 2 minute wait between power down and power up does not result in a freeze.

---Things just keep gettin' curiouser and curiouser! ---

yamafopa!
 
hi

i too have the same problem . Please let me know if you come across the problem

cheers
 
* I have somewhat similar problem. Any help would be appreciated.

* I installed an AccelleraPCI 366 MHz board with 256 mb to upgrade my Win 98 machine. It is a Compaq 166 and I thought maybe I could give it some zip.

* Board worked fine. Win 98 was zipping along and I noticed it showed I had no CD rom and no USB. But I did. Could not access Win 98 CD rom to reinstall drivers and cannot use external modem because it is USB and USB is not reading into systme.

* Therefore, tried boot disk. 3 different ones, in fact.

* They come up as far as the loading of the CD rom driver by Oaktree or whatever ... and then the machine "hangs." Right there and always there.

* I notice that getting into BIOS and change CD from CDROM to AUTO was reported in another post in this thread. Wonder if this would work for me?

Bill
 
UPDATE:

(1) I disabled the new AcceleraPCI card and POOF! on reboot, all my settings were back. (So was the slow CPU speed).

(2) Anyway ... AccleraPCI (Evergreen) website listed "troubleshooting" on that exact problem: I need to disable PnP on motherboard BIOS and set "PCI bus" in "Device Manager" to "Use BIOS."

(3) Problem is: software for this motherboard does not give a PnP yes/no option. Have seen however, that one can achieve the same result by "adding a PCI" expansion board and redirecting an interrupt to it. I think.

(4) either that or there's a jumper somewhere on the mother board.

(5) Hope I can figure this out: this AcceleraPCI upgrade really cooks and will take up to a 600 MHz chip which in turn will respond to a "speed up" program I have. In effect, I can then hit the net at a true 900 MHz with this.

Quite an improvement.

Any info would be appreciated.

Bill
 
The motherboard is a Compaq 166 MHz unit. It lists a "Compaq" BIOS dated July 1996. Found some reviews of this Presario saying it used a "standard mother board but achieved non-standard feaures," etc.

The motherboard has a part number which brings up zip on the net, as does the "Compaq diagram number" listed on the mother board.

The machine itself is a Compaqa Presario model 3020.

Thanks for the response.

Bill
 
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