Flashed BIOS successfuly, now HDD won't boot Windows..
Posted: Sat Dec 28, 2002 4:16 pm
BIOS flashed successfully and the system can't find the 24x cd-rom drive and won't boot from HDD either.
Here's the specs and what occurred:
P166
128mb PC100
2.1gb Fujitsu mpb3021at (4470 cylinders, 15 heads, 63 sectors)
Video: SiS 6215C 2mb PCI
24x Goldstar cd-rom
Motherboard: Pine PT-7504-AB Rev 5.2 (AKA PC Chips M537DMA33)
I installed a second HDD to back up critical files incase something went wrong. I unplugged the IDE & power from the CD-ROM to do that.
I needed to add RAM to it to get it onto the ADSL internet connection. I added the RAM, but the original BIOS only gave access to 32mb. Original BIOS: 08/14/97-VXPro+USB-ULTR-2A5LDH09C-00. Release 08-14-97 S.
I flashed the BIOS to Rainbow's 04/30/1998 537+UMC8670F-2A5LDH09C-00. ( I think it was Rainbow who modified it to handle larger HDD's) The flash went well. No unwritten blocks, no power disruptions. I reset the system when promtped by Awardflash. I found the BIOS in a couple of sites, but I think I used this one: http://www.zarniwoop.force9.co.uk/page9.htm
The system booted normally into Win95, and I confirmed that windows has access to the 128mb. BIOS also saw the 128mb. I powered down & then removed the 2nd HDD drive and attached the CD-ROM again.
Rebooted and now the problem began.
The BIOS see's the 128mb of ram fine. It auto detects the Fujitsu drive as well, but it does not see the cd-rom even though it's set to auto detect.
The BIOS screen then changes to where it tries to boot Windows (updating ESCD...Success) and then hangs after it does a floppy disk seek.
I can insert a bootable floppy and run it. I can even flash a new BIOS without trouble. Even with the new BIOS', it won't boot from HDD.
My next step is to see if FDISK can get access to the drive, but I want to keep the existing Win95 installation if I can.
Is this a BIOS issue or a hardware issue?
Thanks for your input.
Here's the specs and what occurred:
P166
128mb PC100
2.1gb Fujitsu mpb3021at (4470 cylinders, 15 heads, 63 sectors)
Video: SiS 6215C 2mb PCI
24x Goldstar cd-rom
Motherboard: Pine PT-7504-AB Rev 5.2 (AKA PC Chips M537DMA33)
I installed a second HDD to back up critical files incase something went wrong. I unplugged the IDE & power from the CD-ROM to do that.
I needed to add RAM to it to get it onto the ADSL internet connection. I added the RAM, but the original BIOS only gave access to 32mb. Original BIOS: 08/14/97-VXPro+USB-ULTR-2A5LDH09C-00. Release 08-14-97 S.
I flashed the BIOS to Rainbow's 04/30/1998 537+UMC8670F-2A5LDH09C-00. ( I think it was Rainbow who modified it to handle larger HDD's) The flash went well. No unwritten blocks, no power disruptions. I reset the system when promtped by Awardflash. I found the BIOS in a couple of sites, but I think I used this one: http://www.zarniwoop.force9.co.uk/page9.htm
The system booted normally into Win95, and I confirmed that windows has access to the 128mb. BIOS also saw the 128mb. I powered down & then removed the 2nd HDD drive and attached the CD-ROM again.
Rebooted and now the problem began.
The BIOS see's the 128mb of ram fine. It auto detects the Fujitsu drive as well, but it does not see the cd-rom even though it's set to auto detect.
The BIOS screen then changes to where it tries to boot Windows (updating ESCD...Success) and then hangs after it does a floppy disk seek.
I can insert a bootable floppy and run it. I can even flash a new BIOS without trouble. Even with the new BIOS', it won't boot from HDD.
My next step is to see if FDISK can get access to the drive, but I want to keep the existing Win95 installation if I can.
Is this a BIOS issue or a hardware issue?
Thanks for your input.