On Sunday, September 20, 1998 7:25 PM Capt. John M. Zyla wrote:
Have a 486 DX-100 with 16 megs running windows 95b. Lately upon powering
up it gets to the point of starting windows 95 and then it freezes.
Contrl-alt-del does not reboot it. I have to hit the reset, then it loads
with the message windows was not shut down properly, precedes to run
scandisk and then boots up normally as if nothing is wrong.
It does this only on cold boots where power was shut off and until
recently would only ocasionaly freeze at startup. Seems to happening more
frequently lately.
I have looked at the device manager for any conflicts and the system
reports it is configured for optimal performance.
Since it does load properly on the second attempt I do believe it is a
hardware problem. Are there any settings in the bios that I need to look
at or change? Any other ideas? Will creating a bootlog.txt file upon
loading give me any clues?
BTW the cpu is a Cyrix chip.
Thanks; John
Lots of things here, you seem to be on the right track.
I have seen CMOS settings cause this, although the system
also would freeze overnight, since I never shut it down. Loading
CMOS BIOS defaults stopped all the freezes, probably at a
tiny performance penalty, since most PC CMOS can stand a
little optimization. I was also doing a lot of scandisking, too.
Another thing to look at, and I am no expert here, is the
windows registry. I have seen a corrupted registry causing this
and windows automatically loading the registry backup after a reset.
This makes it look like an intermittent hardware problem that fixes itself
when it is just that the registry backup is clean. I don't know how to fix
this, I wipe the windows directory and reinstall windows to fix it when
I see it on my network.
Last, I would try putting scandisk in your autoexec.bat file with the /n /p
parameters, which are for automatic execution and "don't fix errors".
See "checking for errors, - in disks" on the Start, Help, Index, menu in
windows. Scandisk in autoexec.bat will execute earlier than scandisk in
the windows start menu, although it doesn't fix as many errors since it
is running under DOS. Running scandisk before every boot may help
you see a pattern that points to either a software or hardware reason
your disk is getting a little scrambled. If you start pursuing a hardware
culprit, assume everything is a suspect. It could be just about anything,
but you know better than anyone what you installed or loaded last.
OKay one last thought, I saw this on a 486, that's 486, system when
the user had set the BIOS for optimized performance for the wrong cpu.
I can't recall the details, but I think they had the BIOS enabled for some
obscure Cyrix 5x86 feature, but when I pulled the cpu fan the cpu was
an AMD 486 DX/133. You may have the same problem in CMOS, but
this is a long shot since most 486 motherboard BIOS don't have settings
that can be changed for Intel, AMD, or Cyrix cpus. Don't confuse this
with jumper settings. I'm refering to something in CMOS BIOS that is
cpu specific.
Tom Turak
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