[PLUG] trouble booting

[Russell Senior]

I recently encountered an ancient P3/Celeron 1GHz-ish motherboard that
is having trouble booting.  I get the initial splash page with the
power-on self-test, then the screen blanks and I get a blinking cursor
in the upper left.  If I enter setup (with F2), it takes about 60
seconds of the blinking cursor before the setup screen appears.  If I
don't enter setup, after a long delay in some cases I get the initial
part of the GRUB boot up, but it seems to go more slowly and usually
hangs.

I have replaced the box's power supply with a brand-spanking new 400W
one, also replaced the hard disk.  That seemed to help for a week or
so, but symptoms are back now.  I've disconnected the CDROM and floppy
drives (they weren't being used anyway).

I have found one sequence that *seems* to work reliably.  If I enter
setup on the first boot attempt, then F10 to save and exit, after the
associated reboot, the GRUB menu comes up and it boots the OS just
fine.

At one point, the harddisk booting had disappeared from the Boot Order
options, and all I got was a PXE boot attempt.  It wasn't obvious why
that had disappeared, and it had booted successfully before I touched
it (was running when I arrived), and I had not touched that setting.
If it was the CMOS battery, I would expect more obvious clock problems
or warnings.

Any ideas?


-- 
Russell Senior         ``I have nine fingers; you have ten.''
seniorr at aracnet.com