Has anyone experianced book records disappearing on them? I have come across a computer where it refuses to find a boot record during boot up. It has had this problem on and off for the last few months but has recovered itself after a few re-boots, but i think it has given up the ghost this time. Its Windows 98 on a 20gig Maxtor hard drive, 128mb RAM, 1130Mhz AMD Duron, on an old PcChips M810L mobo. The hard drive is identified by the BIOS and during POST.
Is this when it just says 'no' after its passed post? I used to get it quite a bit.... but only after I had formatted or started messing around with hard drives.... adding a slave etc. Try changing the hdd jumpers.... from say cable select to primary, or vice versa. Try configuring the hdd's settings manuelly in bios.... change the dma setting etc. Like I said ive had that problem but only when Ive been tinkering inside
I've owned this mobo for quite a while and let me tell you that it was hard to configure. Try stripping down the system to its bare minimum: 1 hdd, no cd, etc Try booting from a disk, or a disc, and see if it works. You can also try to load the bios defaults, and that's actually the first thing I'd do. you can also try another cable, and another IDE channel to put your hdd on. If I think of something else, I'll post it.
I've looked into it a bit since posting - Maxtor's website talks a bit about these problems so i'm guessing its common - i'm thinking it got hit by a virus attacking the boot record. Ive tried commands like fdisk/mbr and ezdriver/mbr but with no luck. Without a total format is there anything else you kind people can suggest?
Make sure that the BIOS is booting from the hard drive first and that the hard drive is master on the Primary IDE ribbon.
from what i can gather the boot record is there but not connecting to Windows - prehaps because there is a new master boot record in place
Try doing an install over your current Win98 install. Also, if you don't have an anti-virus, get one, something like Norton AV works very well.
