[PLUG] trouble booting

Bill Barry wabarry at gmail.com
Sat Oct 24 23:54:25 UTC 2009


On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Russell Senior <seniorr at aracnet.com> wrote:

>
> 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?
>
>
>
This is very similar to a boot problem I had last year. I know the solution
was just to change a bios setting. I think it had to do with turning off
auto detection for drives that were not there, but my memory of what I did
has faded.

Bill Barry



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