linuxtom

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?

dai

if there are 2 sticks of ram,try it with 1 at a time
have you tried a cmos reset

linuxtom

System only has 1 128M pc2100 dimm, and I have no pc2100 memory to try in it at the time, I did try swapping the stick between bank 1 and bank 2 to confirm it was not a problem with one memory bank.

CMOS was cleared via jumper and battery removal prior to my safe mode windows bios update.

I really need a stick of memory and a spare athlon xp, to test this out, wish i had one.

dai

run wd's diognostic on the h/drive

linuxtom

Prior to zeroing the stock HD in the Compaq, I had already scanned the drive with the latest Wester Digital Diags, it showed no errors. Plus the drive itself was fully accessible when swapped out into one of my other systems.

Even so, as my friend had nothing of any importance on the drive, I figured I'd give zeroing a shot, same as before, the system will allow me to boot from cd with any Linux live cd, run the installer, complete successfully, then on reboot hang. If I attempt to install Windows XP from a boot cd, the install will hang before completion, If I attempt Windows 98SE, the install completes the first phase (file copy), then on reboot hard lock at "Detecting Hardware", but can be forcibly powered off then brought up in safe mode.

It acts like something is happening in protected mode, when disk writes are made, although as I stated, it's wierd because Linux boot cd's all work and install, but won't allow booting from the hard drive either, once install is complete even at init level 1.

I tend to think it's either a problem with the onboard drive controlers, the cpu, or maybe ram, but I can't seem to figure out what is actually happening. Under Linux, when booting with the cd, all hardware looks ok, and I can't fathom what is different when attempting to boot froam a hard drive, plus as I said, I have tried several different hard drive in the machine, and same thing happens regardless of which IDE channel the drive is physically connected to, or drive settings.

I really don't think it's the ram, as that should flake out the Linux live cd's as well, but not sure as I have to spare ram that is compatible with the board to test it.

And I have no IDE cards to try disabling the onboard IDE either, so I am kind of stuck at the moment.

dai

is the ide cable the original,and what are the jumpers set on on the wd