Trouble booting PC - Dev Hardware

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April 17th, 2008, 01:04 AM

bearrider

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Trouble booting PC

Hi

I picked up an old PC with a pentium 533MHz processor and upgraded it with the following :

80GB IDE HDD, 1 GB RAM and an LG 20x DVD combo drive. I have set the BIOS boot sequence to the DVD drive.

Now I try to boot up with an Ubuntu live CD in the drive but the system always stops at this point. Doesn't go further.

Any ideas why? Is there anyway I can get more info? A log file somewhere, for example. Thanks.

-------

Award Medallion BIOS v6.0, An Energy Star Ally
Copyright (c) 1984-2000, Award Software, Inc.

ASUS P3B-F ACPI BIOS Revision 1005

Intel (R) Pentium(R) III 500 MHz Processor
Memory Test : 1048576K OK

Award Plug and Play BIOS Extension v1.0A
Initialize Plug and Play Cards...
PNP Init Completed

Trend ChipAwayVirus(R) On Guard

Detecting Primary Master ... ST380215A
Detecting Primary Slave ... HL-DT-STDVD-RAM GSA-H55N
Detecting Secondary Master ... SAMSUNG SC-148B
Detecting Secondary Master ... LG CD-RW CED-8083B

- <the cursor just stays here blinking...>

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April 17th, 2008, 06:07 AM

Tami

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IIRC most P3 boards will not take a gig of memory, My last P3 boards supported 512 mb on the intel chipset and 768 on the BX chipset board.

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April 17th, 2008, 08:07 AM

dragon-fly

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http://www.hardware-one.com/reviews...usP3B-F_3.shtml

Quote:

Specifications
Here is a breakdown of the motherboard specifications :

Processor

*

Intel Celeron Processor 266MHz - 466MHz.
*

Intel Pentium II Processor 233MHz - 450MHz.
*

Intel Pentium III Processor 450MHz - 600MHz.

Chipset

*

Intel 440BX AGPSet Support and PIIX4E South Bridge.

System Memory

*

4 x 168-pin SDRAM DIMM Slots.
*

Supports from 8MB to 1GB System Memory.
*

Supports PC100-Compliant SDRAM (8/16/32/64/128/256MB) with and without ECC (Error Checking Correction) Capability.

check that the ram is set as pc-100 and that you have 4 sticks of 256.

it is also wierd that the cpu is reading at 500mhz rather than 533 mhz. check that the fsb is set appropriately.

i have the impression that it needs a bios update and alot of tweaking.

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October 13th, 2008, 04:02 PM

av0

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Pull all of your IDE/Floppy cables, PCI cards, and extra sticks of ram out. Check frequency and voltage jumpers for the proper positions. If it boots your in good shape. Mix components (CPU, PSU, RAM) if you have them handy to eliminate possibilities. Pulling your CMOS battery has proven helpful millions of times.

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October 14th, 2008, 10:59 AM

screwballl

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This specific board can handle up to 4 sticks of PC-100 RAM, max 1GB.

I am wondering if the BIOS needs to be updated due to a specific hard drive limitation back in those days:

Quote:

This particular barrier is caused by some versions of the Award BIOS not being able to handle drives having more than 65,535 cylinders. Most hard disk parameters use 16 heads and 63 sectors, which works out to a capacity of approximately 33.8 GB or 31.5 GiB. It is our understanding that on or about June of 1999, this problem had been corrected by Award (requiring a bios update). This is somewhat of an unusual barrier given that most, if not all, hard disks above 8 GB no longer use discrete geometry for access, instead Logical Block Addressing is used along with a flat sector number from 0 to one less than the number of sectors on the drive. No doubt this 65,536 cylinder problem must somehow be related to some older code that was being used, or a compatibility issue with older hard drives (or both). From everything we have been able to examine, this issue was limited to a few machines that relied upon old Award BIOS code that was subsequently corrected with an update.

It also seems that BIOS version 1005 (or 1006, I saw one mention of this) are the latest versions available for this specific board, unfortunately I could not find anything directly on the Asus website.

So In this case, try booting with 1 stick of memory. If it starts loading to CD, then go with a second stick... if it starts loading the Cd then go with the 3rd stick, then 4th stick. If at any time it stops and just blinks liek that then it may be the last memory stick installed is bad...

Another very real option is that either the CD-ROM is bad or the disk with Ubuntu was a bad burn. For older systems (under 1GHz CPU) , burn the disk with the text/alternate installer version, not the LiveCD.

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December 1st, 2008, 02:36 AM

bobdavid00

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Re: Trouble booting PC

i think your boards not suppoted 1 gb RAM. please check your boards.

Comments on this post

hoskind1 disagrees: we've already determined it can take 1gb..

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