Hi, have you replaced your CMOS battery lately? My daughter's 486 machine
exhibited some weird start up symptoms a while ago and it was suggested here
to me to replace the battery. It worked and made sense since it was 6+ years
old at that time.
Good luck,
Brad Loomis
Los Angeles, CA


I have a seven year old 486DX2-66 with 40MB RAM that will not boot even with
boot disks. When I turn it on, it performs the memory test to 40MB then
starts over several times, then the Windows98 screen comes up and
disappears, the system beeps once. It goes back to DOS and gives me the
following messages:

Error:  Unable to control A20 line!
          XMS Driver not installed.

Warning:  the high memory area (HMA) is not available. Additional low memory
(below 640K) will be used instead.
               HIMEM.SYS is missing.
               Make sure that the file is in your Windows directory.


Then the system goes to the C prompt but by then my keyboard has stopped
working, so I cannot type anything.

When I put in the boot disk, the A drive lights up for a few seconds, but
there is no sound (it is not reading the disk)


I have searched for all information related to this, and tried pressing F8
and pressing F5, and I have tried reseating the memory, all to no avail. Is
it time to give up???

Thanks so much,
Sheryl

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