Tech Support Forum - View Single Post

linuxtom · 06-14-2007, 06:32 AM

Hi, I have a strange problem, that I can't resolve. A friend brought me his Compaq S4020MW to look at, at the time it had WinXP SP2 installed and was freezing at boot, saying it was unable to locate various files. I initially suspected this to be related to the OS itself. Knowing that the pc came with a restore partition, I hit F10 and loaded restore, it got to installing files and hard locked. I rebooted with my boot diags cd and scanned both partitions for errors, none found. Tried again to boot, same results, hard lock. Tried this several times, simply would not work. I booted again and ran wddiag, said disk was fine, but still would not load XP, or allow restore to complete. Used wddiag to zero partition 2 (XP), tried restore, locked during file copy. I tried with an XP boot cd, still locked up. I tried with 98SE boot cd, installed, then after reboot locked during hardware detection. BIOS settings all correct, allthough limited by the crappy Compaq BIOS options. I determined this to be hardware related, this is what I have tried.

1. IDE Cables swapped
2. Toggled drive settings, M,S,CS
3. Switched drive positions
4. Tried different hard drive
5. Different mice, both ps/2 and serial
6. Swapped video cards both pci and agp tried
7. Different Power supply
8. Removed all add on cards.
9. BIOS update via safe-mode 98 using different hard drive (?)
10. Zeroed hard drive and repeated above

Only thing I haven't tried is different ram (don't have any pc2100 lying around).

Weird thing is that using the different hard drive with 98 in safe mode, 9 times out of 10, the system will load.

Also trying various Linux live Cd's, the machine will boot and run fine, long enough to install the OS, but then hangs on reboot to hard drive during initrd phase.

I am think this has something to do with the motherboard or CPU now, just not sure what I am missing, especially since ubuntu and pclinux will both run and install via livecd, but then lockup at boot, it's really strange.

From what I know of this machine, it a 40G Western Digital drive, bios will not allow changing DMA, set to UDMA5, 128M pc2100 ram, on-board video with shared memory currently tried 8,16,32 modes, on-board AC97 sound, 5 USB ports, AMD Athlon XP 2G, onboard lan.

Anyone have any idea why everything seems to work, except boot from a hard drive, regardless of what hard drive you use?

06-14-2007, 06:32 AM	#1 (permalink)
linuxtom Registered User Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 4 OS: Linux	Cannot boot from Hard Drive period Hi, I have a strange problem, that I can't resolve. A friend brought me his Compaq S4020MW to look at, at the time it had WinXP SP2 installed and was freezing at boot, saying it was unable to locate various files. I initially suspected this to be related to the OS itself. Knowing that the pc came with a restore partition, I hit F10 and loaded restore, it got to installing files and hard locked. I rebooted with my boot diags cd and scanned both partitions for errors, none found. Tried again to boot, same results, hard lock. Tried this several times, simply would not work. I booted again and ran wddiag, said disk was fine, but still would not load XP, or allow restore to complete. Used wddiag to zero partition 2 (XP), tried restore, locked during file copy. I tried with an XP boot cd, still locked up. I tried with 98SE boot cd, installed, then after reboot locked during hardware detection. BIOS settings all correct, allthough limited by the crappy Compaq BIOS options. I determined this to be hardware related, this is what I have tried. 1. IDE Cables swapped 2. Toggled drive settings, M,S,CS 3. Switched drive positions 4. Tried different hard drive 5. Different mice, both ps/2 and serial 6. Swapped video cards both pci and agp tried 7. Different Power supply 8. Removed all add on cards. 9. BIOS update via safe-mode 98 using different hard drive (?) 10. Zeroed hard drive and repeated above Only thing I haven't tried is different ram (don't have any pc2100 lying around). Weird thing is that using the different hard drive with 98 in safe mode, 9 times out of 10, the system will load. Also trying various Linux live Cd's, the machine will boot and run fine, long enough to install the OS, but then hangs on reboot to hard drive during initrd phase. I am think this has something to do with the motherboard or CPU now, just not sure what I am missing, especially since ubuntu and pclinux will both run and install via livecd, but then lockup at boot, it's really strange. From what I know of this machine, it a 40G Western Digital drive, bios will not allow changing DMA, set to UDMA5, 128M pc2100 ram, on-board video with shared memory currently tried 8,16,32 modes, on-board AC97 sound, 5 USB ports, AMD Athlon XP 2G, onboard lan. Anyone have any idea why everything seems to work, except boot from a hard drive, regardless of what hard drive you use?