-=> CHARLES ANGELICH wrote to WAYNE CHIRNSIDE <=-

Swapped out both the CMOS battery and the IDE cable.
Took a few minutes to look for how hard they'd be to get to
and they were pretty well in the open so I went ahead with it.
Well the battery was _after_ I removed IDE channel 0's
ribbon cable. Doubt it was the CMOS battery as it gave a red
glow on a quick test on a 6 volt bulb.
I put the new battery in anyway.
Now I'll give it a week or so and try out the old Quantum drive
to see if that might be good.
You motivated me by suggesting the same things I'd thought of
and it only took me about 15 minutes.
If the it checks out and the Quantum drive I snatched out turns out
to be good I'll be one happy happy camper :-)
Win 98 should still be intact with all my settings
and software setup and configured on that drive if it turns
out it's good.
Wish me luck!

 WC> It's some kind of weird problem where the operating system
 WC> is not found on boot. I've seen error messages "No
 WC> operating system found." Another error message I've seen is
 WC> "disk timeout error" and all the power saving features are
 WC> turned off in CMOS. One time on boot the CMOS settings for
 WC> the C drive had mysteriously vanished and I had to re-enter
 WC> the values manually as "auto" did not identify the drive as
 WC> it had before. It's an intermittent sort of thing, worst
 WC> kind of problem to diagnose. I changed the first listed
 WC> boot drive to A: with C coming second just in case. I've
 WC> also seen "error 200 hard disk failure" _one_ time but this
 WC> is the second drive to indicate similar problems so i'm
 WC> guessing maybe onboard I/O controller failure?

 CA> This sounds like a bad connector or ribbon cable but I don't
 CA> think that could reset the CMOS settings for the drive unless
 CA> it was set to auto-detect and saw no hard drive? Otherwise that
 CA> would seem to indicate a low/bad battery for the CMOS.  Being
 CA> an older machine it is possible that it is both a bad connection
 CA> and a bad battery in the CMOS?  Ribbon cables _used_ to be
 CA> cheaper than batteries for the CMOS.  I might try the cable
 CA> first.


 
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