d8b Forum

My first posting as my trusty hdr24 bites the dust.
I got error 43 so changed the 3v cell - the old one read 2.6v. I set the bios to the large drive settings. It just says loading operating system and periodically tries to access the floppy drive, cycling like this until I switch it off.

So, maybe it's not the cell. The thing is, I looked at the bios chip and it is dated 1999. However, I have been using the machine with a 80gb internal drive and 120gb in the caddies (one of which was formatted and verified in this machine).

I can't see how it has accepted large hard drives, and this is clouding the issue with regard to trying to fault find. Also - wasn't really sure which version of the bios settings to try, but my machine (1.4) bios screen matched that of the bios for the large drives - not sure if there is actually anything different in the bios settings (that the user has to set) between large vs standard or if its more a case of just setting up again it after the cell and chip have been out.

I'm inclined to try reloading the o/s off of floppies but I couldn't get my one and only floppy equipped pc to write them. Other ideas include replacing the bios chip (with large) buying a hard drive with o/s already on or changing the eprom.

Dunno how to insert an image but the chip is PhoenixBios OEM BIOS (M6) Phoenix 1999, 000496663

Very puzzling. Any thoughts welcome!

Ah, the joys of trying to find that one floppy bisquit that still works....
I ended up buying a relatively cheap chinese floppy emulator, that uses a regular usb stick for the floppy images. Works wonders.

Anyways, what do you have on your screen while it's cycling? Do you get past the bios boot screens? If so, you might be stuck on one of the first loading screens, which could indicate a software problem. If you're still using the old harddrive, it could be that it is getting corrupted.

It's very interesting that you've been able to use large drives - do the bios boot screens report the sizes and such correctly?
How long have that worked?

If you're up for it, I would probably try getting the custom bios chip - I think it might be more stable.
Also, if you already have the hood off, you might want to consider to get an ide-compact flash adapter, and use compact flash cards instead. It's much less noise, and the os loads faster. Plus - I made some images of a newly installed system, so it's much easier to simply move the CF card to a pc reader/writer, and put the image on. It also makes the drive bay sort of obsolete, since it easy and fast to transfer files to your pc.