Friends,

I have a Digital Equipment XL-590 90 meg pentium that is acting very strange. If
you set the cmos it starts to boot, checks memory, then the screen characters
turn to graphics box characters and the machine hangs. I have reset the cmos
using the clear cmos jumper on the mother board, run it through a boot cycle,
turn off again and reset the cmos jumper to normal. The machine comes on, starts
memory counting, tells me that the cmos battery is bad, and the cmos checksum is
bad -- run setup. It then goes through the sdms scsi bios check, recognizes the
hard drive and the cd-rom that is in the machine, hits F1 to resume, f2 to setup
cmos.

If you press f1, the machine will do a boot. This machine has dos and NT 3.51 on
it. I have not tried to boot NT, but have gotten to dos, and the hard drive
seems fine.

Another teltale is the write indicator on the floppy is on all the time when the
machine has booted. However it will get a directory if I request one. I don't
know if the drive is continually spinning or the light is on full time.

Other info:

90 Meg Pentium,
24 megabytes of ram
PhoenixBIOS version 4.04 Plug and Play bios

Does anyone have any ideas on this problem?

Thanks,

Paul Pullen