Hello Wayne -

[...]

 CA> I can live without the 'help' of any automated "turner-offer". ;-)

 WC>  Well my current settings give no trouble and the monitor
 WC> being 2 1/2 feet to the left of my head I like the screen
 WC> blanking rather than a night light.
 WC>  Rather like leaving the filiment lit to cut down on thermal
 WC> shock.

I dislike the 'pop's when the monitor is turned on/off but
I prefer to turn my equipment on/off at times of my choosing.

 WC> But just before I gave up I entered the proper figures into
 WC> CMOS and booted with my LINUX rescue disk and lo and behold
 WC> Knoppix came right up with no problem whatsoever!

 CA> That CMOS was affected seems to point to some sort of power glitch
 CA> rather than software related (not a Windows glitch).

 WC> Can't be the CMOS battery, brand new and tested good.
 WC> Battery holder is secure as well.
 WC> Only the primary 0 hard drive setting was affected,
 WC> everything else held.

Possibly the CMOS is failing (old age?).

[...]

 CA> CMOS was trashed you said?  Windows uses CMOS, Linux does not.

 WC> Yeah, set CMOS, rebooted from Linux emergency boot disk
 WC> and it worked fine.
 WC> Only primary drive 0 setting was showing "none", everything
 WC> else was OK.
 WC> Weird as it's set to "user" instead of autodetect.
 WC> Rebooted to the Windows rescue disk and that's when
 WC> everything turned to crud.
 WC> Windows 3.1 never did this sort of thing to me!!!

We always have to factor TIME into the equation.  Over time, things
degrade and when we transfer our OS to other hardware it 'lives' in
an unknown world of possible problems/failures/glitches caused by
the different hardware. :-\

 WC> Mounted /dev/hda1 /mnt and had a look around and
 WC> the files and directories on the 98 FAT 32 partition
 WC> looked fine.

 CA> A marginal voltage from the power supply?  Could be the
 CA> refrigerator kicking in and temporarily dropping the
 CA> wattage to a marginal power supply?

 WC>  The computer is by design on a completely separate leg
 WC>  of my wiring and has a surge protector.
 WC>  AC, refridgerator and microwave are on different circuits.
 WC>  Load on this leg is at at MOST 400 watts with no inductive
 WC> components.

I had a friend who was (many years ago) attempting to market 'white box'
computers with his dad.  He told me that they had an average of one
burned out machine every month and they couldn't figure out why.  He
mentioned later in the day that his father had wired the entire house.
I didn't want to tell him THAT was probably why the machines were
burning up mysteriously. ;-)

 CA> Electro-static shock at the wrong time in the wrong place?  I had
 CA> something like this from a loose power cord not shoved into the
 CA> back of the machine tightly.

 WC> The multiple self restarting passes through scanreg was
 WC> expecially vexing to me.
 WC> It remains a puzzlement.
 
Scanreg doesn't _normally_ do restarts while executing.  It may be
that the hard drive onboard electronics are glitching or there is
a bad connection involving the hard drive in there somewhere?


>
>    ,                  ,
>  o/  Charles.Angelich \o       ,
>   __o/
> / >      USA, MI      < \   __\__

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