PureBasic Forums - English

I just bought a cheap second-hand Acer PC on eBay, and got it last night.
It came with a 10 GB hard drive and CD-ROM. I never tried booting it, but
I instead opened it up (as one would) and swapped the hard drive with one
of my 13 GB ones, and swapped the CD-ROM with a DVD-ROM.

I then booted from a DOS floppy and fdisk'ed the hard drive, making it one
partition only, and formatted it as FAT32. All was fine, but the DVD-ROM
wasn't "seen", ie. if I put a boot CD in, it wouldn't work. So I powered down
to check the cables etc, the HD is set to Master and DVD to Slave. I then
(maybe stupidly?) removed the CMOS battery to "reset" the BIOS, which
I think is the cause of my problem: NOW IT WON'T BOOT AT ALL.

When I power up, nothing is shown on the monitor at all. The green LED on
the monitor is always orange now, meaning that no valid signal is getting
to it. The hard drive LED on the case seems to flash on briefly every now
and then, but stays off most of the time. Sticking in a boot floppy doesn't
achieve anything -- it's never accessed at all.

Any ideas? Have I truly stuffed this up? It was only cheap (AUS $106) so
I'm not concerned about the money, but I really want to get it working. Is
there anything obvious that I haven't checked? Thanks for any advice.

Remove the harddisk and only have the dvd drive, then reset the cmos again.

Then if it doesnt work, remove the dvd drive and keep the hdd only, reset cmos.

If nothing, dont have anything like drives or network cards, and reset cmos.

@thefool: Thanks, I'll try that. I assume you mean after I've reset the CMOS
that way, that I can then re-plug in both the HD and DVD drives again?

There's usually a jumper on the MB you have to close when you take the battery out and put a new one in. You may have to research the docs online for that motherboard to find out which jumper it is. Once you follow the directions they give, it should work fine.

@netmaestro: Thanks, I'll check that out too if thefool's tips don't work.

Well, I finally solved it... turns out it didn't like the new HD, because when I
put the original one back in, it booted fine. So then I went to the BIOS and
saw the HD settings were "Auto" so I changed it to "User" and manually
specified the number of cylinders etc of the other hard drive, then plugged
it in, and wouldn't ya know it -- the PC now likes the new HD!

My thoughs too (that one of the drives didnt work..). You wouldnt have to reset the cmos all the times though i was just tired and then writing in a loop hehe

I never would have thought that a hard drive could "freeze" a computer at
power on. Quite stupid, actually. Oh well, at least I learned something.

Edit: Actually, the PC didn't boot with NO hard drive either... is that normal?
I would have thought that without ANY hard drive that I should still be able
to get to the BIOS screen? Because that definitely didn't happen.

Edit: Actually, the PC didn't boot with NO hard drive either... is that normal?
I would have thought that without ANY hard drive that I should still be able
to get to the BIOS screen? Because that definitely didn't happen.

Yeah, that is weird. You should be able to boot from a floppy with no hard drive at all. Many folks turn those old PCs into hard-drive-less routers/firewalls/server.