Mobo battery died+ HDD Failure

[RayB]

So I thought my power supply had died, since it wouldn't power on anymore. Turned out to be the CMOS motherboard battery was dead. I replaced it and jumpered the power terminal and one it came, but now I have all sorts of problems booting. What gets wiped when the battery dies?

What's the best way to find out what my old settings were?

I have what I *think* are the right settings for the CPU and memory, and I think the hard drive settings are right too... maybe... The thing seems to get as far as booting DOS and then just a black screen. I suspect I have IRQ conflicts. What a pain!

(It's a 1 ghz AMD /Asus system with Windows 98 booting to DOS).

When I boot I see a message about failing to detect UltraATA devices, but I'm pretty sure the drive is working.

[Jammin0]

Newer computers have auto-detect on the drives. . . On an older bios you need to go in and setup all your drives.  You are getting into the bios alright?  Usually press DEL or F2 when booting.  You can either look at the numbers on your hard drive, usually a sticker on the top, or just start trying settings where it says IDE/Primary Master or something similar.  As long as you are only changing those settings you can't mess anything up, make sure you exit and save changes each try until you have it working. Besides a hard drive do you have other drives in there?  CD or DVD drive?

[RayB]

I unhooked the CD-ROM drive. That got me booting to POST and then "Loading Windows DOS" and then black screen. I suspect IRQ conflicts with the sound card or it could also be that the harddrive has gone bad (it was flakey to begin with).

[Malenko]

so unhook everything cept the HD and see if it boots. keep adding components till it stops working

[ChadTower]

Can this one boot from USB?  I would make a bootable thumb drive and see if I can boot that way.  If you can you know the issue is on the hard drive.

[Jammin0]

Sometimes a HD won't boot because it is hooked up wrong.  If it is jumpered as a slave drive and the CD was a master, taking out the Cd would cause weird issues.  If you can't figure out how you had it setup before then I would second taking everything off, double check to make sure your drive is in Master mode and plug only it in.  Could also be a video card problem, you say you're booting to DOS?  When the screen goes blank do you still get a HD activity light?

[RayB]

turns out I'm getting HDD BOOT FAILURE

I connect it to my regular desktop and ran a disk check on it. It corrected a bunch of bad sectors which it put in a folder called "FOUND". That contains a bunch of 16kb .CHK files. What do I do now?

[Malenko]

new HD, hook up the old one as a slave and hope you can copy everything over

[equlizer]

Try and do a FIXMBR if you can then reboot computer.

Hard drives are soo cheap these days anyways

[ark_ader]

Try and do a FIXMBR if you can then reboot computer.

Hard drives are soo cheap these days anyways

Not as cheap as last month.

I had the same problem with my BIOS, and one particular old hard drive. 

We are talking non auto configuration, then you will have to key the drive details into CMOS directly. 

Just look on the drive and you will see it listed.  Check the jumpers on the drive and make sure it tallys with the CMOS settings.

Unless it is SCSI....