VOGONS


First post, by Ace

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I dug up an old Packard Bell Legend 316SX my father brought home over 10 years ago, and I'm trying to get it back up and running again(computer runs on an AMD 386SX clocked at 25MHz with 4MB of RAM). The hard drive that was originally in the computer crashed, and I wound up replacing it with a 7GB hard drive in which I formatted a 200MB partition using FDISK(this computer will not work with partitions bigger than 200MB). The floppy drive was also replaced, since the old one is having a lot of trouble reading floppies(but the new drive is many times slower than the old one). Since this computer has no CD-ROM drive and Windows 95 seems like it'll be really sluggish, I decided to install MS-DOS v6.22 on the hard drive. It took a really long time to install, but it installed no problem. However, when I restarted the computer to test out DOS, it would not boot. It gets past the POST, but after that, the hard drive activity LED remains lit for several minutes(it's not blinking) before the computer gives an error(I don't remember what the error says, but I'll check what it says later on today).

I did have a few rather nasty RAM problems on a computer which I set up for a Windows 95/Windows XP dual-boot where whenever I'd boot XP, I'd get an error saying a file was missing, the Windows XP install disc failed to work, and whenever I tried to boot Windows 95, the computer would reset itself. Once I removed the faulty RAM stick, the problems went away. This leads me to believe there might be a faulty RAM stick in the 316SX. Is this a RAM problem or is something else shot on the motherboard?

Reply 2 of 9, by Markk

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Check on the error message. It's going to help. I don't think it's a RAM problem, as the OS hasn't even started to boot yet. You said you formated the partition using fdisk. Fdisk just creates and deletes partitions and defines logical drives on secondary(extended) partitions. After that you need to use the format command of a startup disk. By guessing I can think of three possible causes. 1. If you didn't use the format command, and except the 200MBpartition you created, there was already another partition on the disk, and it may be that , where the DOS was installed, so it can't boot(possibly if it's that, you may have a D: disk, and an unusable C:) 2. Have you made the partition active? It's a special command in fdisk to do that. 3. In it's time, the largest disks were about 200-300MB . The 7gb may not be compatible with this machine.

Reply 3 of 9, by Ace

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Doesn't DOS automatically format the partition during the installation? I remember being prompted by DOS' installer to format the partition I created with FDISK(and yes, the partition was made active). Anyways, here's the error I get:

Non-system disk or disk error
Replace and press any key when ready

What can cause this?

Question: would it be a good idea to use a Compact Flash card on this computer rather than a hard drive?

EDIT: I removed the partition with FDISK, made another 200MB partition, then formatted the partition with FORMAT. DOS is installing again and I'll post back what happens when DOS finishes installing. And by the way, it's not a RAM problem. Neither of the 2 RAM sticks in the computer are faulty, as the problem did not go away with either of the sticks missing.

EDIT 2: Crap, I get an error when DOS finishes installing as follows:

An error occurred while reading or writing to drive C

What now?

Reply 4 of 9, by Markk

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You should try with a smaller disk. I also think that on these machines, the bios doesn't support disks larger than ~500MB. Yep, you can also use a compact flash or even SD card. It's very quick compared to old disks, and noiseless. I've used both(CF/SD) on my old pcs, however I had a problem, that resembles yours. The first time I tried the card it wouldn't boot, even if it was formatted ok, and installed dos. I found out that the best way to get it to work, was to run the AMI BIOS diagnostics on my old 286, and low level format the card from there. After that it works great.

Reply 5 of 9, by Ace

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The BIOS on the 316SX supports hard drives no bigger than 200MB.

How would I go about doing a low-level format of the hard drive on this computer? I don't remember what kind of BIOS is on this computer, but I believe it's a Phoenix BIOS. I'll have to check again to make sure.

Creator of The Many Sounds of:, a collection of various DOS games played using different sound cards.

Reply 6 of 9, by Markk

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I think it's not such a good idea to low level format a physical drive if there isn't some sort of serious problem on it. Wait a minute. What's your BIOS setting of the disk? Does it have the standard 46 types, and type 47 that is configured by the user?

Reply 7 of 9, by Ace

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This BIOS has no user-configurable settings as far as I know. I'll go have a look and report back.

EDIT: The computer goes up to Type 49 for hard drives, with Types 48 and 49 that are user-configurable. I'll need to check in another computer the number of heads and cylinders in the hard drive before I try again.

Reply 9 of 9, by Ace

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It seems my hard drive has more cycles than this computer can take. The 316SX will only go up to 9999 for the number of cylinders, so it looks like my 7GB hard drive is not gonna cut it for getting the 316SX working again(this hard drive has 14888 cycles). I'll try to see if I can get the original hard drive working again. I'm not entirely sure if it crashed or is just corrupt(I think it crashed, but you never know).

Creator of The Many Sounds of:, a collection of various DOS games played using different sound cards.