Brad Loomis wrote:
>
> Good day,
> I received a call from my daughter about her 486-66. She said she started
> having "problems" running programs last week. Then yesterday upon booting
> she received the message on booting "FDD controller failure" and "HDD
> controller Failure" "Press F1 to resume". Natch, she can't boot. I assume
> that means that the controller card has taken a dump. Am I correct in this
> long distance diagnosis? Is this as simple as pulling the old controller
> card and plugging in a new one? Well, that and blowing out about ten pounds
> of cat hair. I found a SIIG Fast EIDE card
> http://www.siig.com/ide/eide_master_isa___io.html at the local Fry's and it
> looks like what I need. Am I on the right track? Of course this comes as
> grad school mid-terms are due.
> Thanks,
> Brad Loomis
>
Brad:
You might give this one a try: Sometimes just pulling the card, cleaning
the contacts (I've heard that rubbing them with a pencil eraser will
help. I don't know about that one, but I've used Radio Shack contact
cleaner successfully), and putting it back in the motherboard -- making
sure that it's firmly seated -- will make a difference. There are two
mechanisms at work here. First, boards tend to creep out of the sockets
due to the constant thermal cycling that occurs. Second, oxides form on
the surfaces which raise the resistance. Since it's a 486, there's been
lots of time for these things to happen.

BTW, are you sure that the EIDE card can provide floppy disk access? I'm
not familiar with the SIIG card, but my Promise card is solely for hard
drives.
Carroll Grigsby
(who has also had to fix my daughter's computer by telephone)

         PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download
                     visit our download web page at:
                     http://nospin.com/pc/files.html