Hi Ellen,
Sunday, December 30, 2001, 7:09:10 AM, you wrote:
E> Most of my posts have been long, but I have a feeling
E> this one will be unreal...
Yep. That's okay. I understand your frustration.
There's something I need to say here, though, that I hope will help us
with further discussions.
I believe your changing settings that go beyond what you and I or
other members of the PCBUILD list have specifically discussed is
hindering my efforts to help your situation.
I noted with much interest your foray into the BIOS and the settings
you altered there. You must understand that settings you alter in CMOS
will ripple into Windows and beyond.
Troubleshooting is a long, careful process. It needs to be. A
check-box unchecked may not only de-select what it was you were trying
to alter, but it may affect how a software package works (if at all).
At worse, it can bring down a system. Believe me; I spend nine hours
every day with folks testing and troubleshooting. It's a process; it
has to be deliberate.
Now, we are trying to troubleshoot over an e-mail list. This makes the
testing crawl. Furthermore, especially in this situation, you are my
eyes and ears. You have to describe everything to me as factually as
possible, writing it all down over and over in an e-mail.
So, troubleshooting this way is slow and tedious. If I were you, I'd
be climbing the walls wanting to know what's wrong.
If this a is a bit too slow -- I'd think so -- you might want to
consider the possibility that you'd feel better taking your system to
a local PC shop. Yes, you will pay for this service. But not only will
your friendly tech be able to see, with her own eyes, what's wrong,
but they'll be able to show you the answers to each and every
question.
I'm not saying that I can't help you. I am saying that in order to
keep testing the way we're testing, we have to keep our settings and
alterations of those settings straight. Of course, you can play
around, but I need to know when/if you make any permanent changes. I'd
also need to know why you made the change.
I swear, I swear, I swear! I am not trying to browbeat you or
embarrass you. I simply want us to get to the solution as quickly as
possible and, historically, making changes outside what we've talked
about will only make things harder.
To that end, on with the show:
E> It was purchased new from Dell in August 2000, so just
E> about a year and a half old.
What is the model? Does the system have a "service tag" sticker on it?
If so, what is that number? I may be able to find some technical
documents on the model; I have for other clients.
E> LBA is specifically (listed under each specific IDE in
E> CMOS) enabled in 1) Primary IDE Master (my HD), 2)
E> Secondary IDE Master (DVD-Rom) and 3) Secondary IDE
E> Slave (zip). No Primary IDE Slave installed
This is fine.
E> As I wote in my last post, Fdisk /status gives me a
E> strange reading. Hopefully someone will know what this
E> means?
E> My hard drive is 20.4Gb, with one active partition, C:
E> Disk Drive Mbytes Free Usage
E> -----------------------------------------------
E> 1 19060 100%
E> C: 19060
At the moment, I am fine with what you're seeing here. First of all,
it's more evidence that the drive is not operating with an overlay,
secondly, all this really says that that 100% of the disk is bound to
one primary partition. It doesn't mean that 100% of the disk is full
of data.
Now, this could be problematic. Some BIOS need a "system save"
partition in order to place the system into Sleep. I don't believe
this is the case with DELL systems, however. I know Compaq has done
it.
The way you know if you need this partition is if the system complains
during POST about the missing partition.
E> a. booting to DOS with a Win98 bootdisk and selecting
E> Command Prompt Only, with a MEM /C (or any MEM
E> command) I get "bad command or file name"
That's correct. You'd either have to CD to C:\WINDOWS\ and run MEM
from there or place it on the floppy run it from A:\.
E> b. with a boot to DOS from the HD and selecting
E> Command Prompt Only, MEM /C gets me a whole chart, but
E> the Total Conventional Memory is exactly 655,360.
Again, this is more evidence there is no drive overlay in place.
At this point, I would be surprised if there is an overlay.
E> I get: "Drvspce.bin" @ 68,871 bytes. [...]
E> brings up 9 .bin files, plus drvspace.bin and
E> dblspace.bin [...]
Are these other bins on C:\ ? In other words, do they reside at root?
Also, are you able to find any ovl files in C:\ ?
>>2. Who manufacturered the hard drive(s)?
E> Maxtor
Fine.
E> However, despite the Dell techs "assumptions", I
E> believe the controllers may be (or SOME are anyway)
E> SCSI, because of a few things:
I seriously doubt your system is running SCSI disks. The majority of
desktop systems are IDE/ATA. You would have either had to specifically
request SCSI or you bought a server level system. You start getting
into major money when you add SCSI controllers and disks.
But let's see what you got.
E> Troubleshooting Settings": the "Use SCSI Double
E> Buffering" line is checked and greyed-out
This is normal for Windows whether you are in fact using SCSI or not.
E> REM [SCSI Controllers]
E> *These 2 "blanks" are both checked to load - there are
E> a number of "blanks" in my system.
Firstly, the REM statement means "Remark." It is MSDOS convention for
a comment. Whether it not the line gets parsed, it doesn't do
anything.
Secondly, the reason you see "blanks," is because there _are_ blank
lines in your config.sys. That's not an issue. MSCONFIG shows every
line in the file. If you were to add fifty blank lines to your
config.sys, MSCONFIG may show fifty check boxes next to blank lines.
In other words, both of these do nothing to add SCSI support.
E> "Disable write-behind caching for all drives"
This has nothing to do with whether your system is running SCSI
or IDE disks.
If you want more information about this setting:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q247485
E> AIC - 6260/6360/6370 ASPI Manager for DOS
E> AIC - 78XX/AIC - 75XX ASPI Manager for DOS
E> AHA - 1540/1542/1640 ASPI Manager for DOS
E> AIC - 7890/91 ASPI Manager for DOS
E> ASPI CD-ROM Driver for DOS
All these lead me to believe that there is some SCSI device on your
system. The 1540 is a SCSI host adapter, as is the 6360 and 7890.
Do this:
Right-click on My Computer, select Properties. Tab over the the Device
Manager. In Device Manager, look for the listing "Hard Disk
Controllers." Expand the listing. Write back to me with the lines
underneath that listing.
E> And there are no settings at all in CMOS/BIOS for SCSI
E> controllers.
SCSI controllers generally have their own BIOS. You can usually watch
the separate BIOS post for the SCSI Adapater. It will scan the SCSI
chain for devices.
But I'm more interested in what Windows reports under the Hard Drive
Controllers section.
E> One other thing. I found an icon in my Windows folder
E> for "MS-DOS MODE FOR GAMES WITH EMS AND XMS SUPPORT".
E> It took me out of windows to a command prompt, were I
E> did a MEM /C and MEM /ALL. The results of which were
E> different than the other MEM commands I'd used.
This is fine. Do not worry about it. It's immaterial to our
discussion. All it does
I hope you managed to place your BIOS settings back to their initial
settings.
PCBUILD's List Owners:
Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>
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