Re: [tlug] NEC Trouble: Fixing Causes versus Treating Symptoms

[Jim <jep200404@example.com>]

"Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" wrote:

> ... sometimes (nearly all 
> the time now) when I try to power it up, the BIOS insists on booting 
> from the floppy and *only* the floppy.  

>  15-20 attempts finally 
> produce a successful boot.  Internet searches have not produced an 
> upgrade BIOS for the bugger, 

Consider the possibility that this is a hardware problem, 
particularly one with the hard drive or floppy drive. 

When the laptop is insisting on booting only the floppy, 
does it acknowledge detection of the hard drive? 
Booting the floppy could be a fall back action when there 
is no hard drive (detected). 

When your computer has floppy-lust, go into your BIOS settings 
and see what hard drive it detects. 

Also, boot Tom's Root Boot, then see what hard drives it thinks 
you have. (Explore /proc/ide.)

   http://www.toms.net/rb/

Tom's Root Boot should be a standard tool that you have laying 
around waiting for a situation like this. Same for Knoppix. 

That your machine's floppy lust can be sated by _any_ floppy 
(even a non-bootable floppy or even an unformatted floppy?) 
may indicate that the machine _thinks_ that there is a floppy 
disk in the drive, even when there is not. It could be that the 
machine gets stuck trying to read non-existent floppies 
when the machine thinks there is a floppy in the drive. 
Hence the machine will not proceed until it is fed with a floppy 
to read. Actually, I give this higher probability of causing 
trouble than hard drive detection. 

For phantom floppies, I would suspect: 

1. Dirty contact somewhere, especially where floppy signals 
   mate into machine. For this, remove and reinstall floppy drive. 

2. Dust blocking optical floppy sensor. For this, blast the drive 
   with air. If that doesn't solve it, remove dust with tweezers. 

3. Dirty floppy switch contacts. For this, clean the contacts with 
   with contact cleaner like Cramolin. Don't be ham-handed. 

4. Mechanically broken little part of floppy switch/sensor. 

Some of these things involve _careful_ disassembly of the 
machine and/or floppy drive. Do be careful. 

> Internet searches have not produced an 
> upgrade BIOS for the bugger, 

Good. BIOS upgrades are an efficient way to bugger oneself. 

Investigate the hardware first.