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hard disk wont boot but no failure?

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First post, by ratfink

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I was tinkering with my 486 box yesterday trying to get a pci-pcmcia adapter working. The machine runs 95 but i was using dos mode. I left the machine for half an hour, and when I returned I rebooted. No joy, it hangs on the system confuiguration screen. It autodetects the hd. But no Boot and no disk error.
I tried removing the hd in bios and booting then gives a boot failure due to no floppy in drive. . I guess either I changed some setting without realising, or some component is or has failed. Any ideas? I guess I will try another hd in case it's that.

Reply 1 of 4, by ratfink

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Its an Abit BN4 with s3 pci, 3com pci, gus and sb pro2.

I was trying to get an elan p111 working under dos - at that time i did not realise the p111 requires a pentium - that seems to be how it checks for pci 2.1 compliance.

Reply 2 of 4, by ux-3

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Have you moved the HDD to another system and tried to access it there?

Could the Cmos battery have failed?

Retro PC warning: The things you own end up owning you.

Reply 3 of 4, by h-a-l-9000

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Boot from a Win95 start disk and look at the C: drive.

1+1=10

Reply 4 of 4, by ratfink

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Before I read your posts I tried other drives in the system. They worked but I had a lot of trouble with disk geometries on the disks differing from what the bios detected, and one of them started to fail. The original disk may have been the victim of a power cable fault; I'll check it more closely when I get a test system up and running.

Doesn't seem to be a problem with the cmos battery from what I can tell.

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