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

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

Jim wrote:

> > [LHS] ... 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). 
>  

I don't think it's the hard drive - once it's up and running there is 
never any problem, and what happens when booting, is that about one 
second after hitting the power button, the floppy drive starts the 
"kathunk-kathunk".  I suppose that's enough time for it to try the hard 
drive, give up, and go to the floppy, but I'm skeptical.  It seems to be 
going immediately to the floppy without trying the hard drive or the 
CD-ROM drive.  Also, once it's up and running, there are no problems 
with the hard drive.

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

The irritating thing, is that on that d*** NEC, it starts with the 
message "Press F2 for BIOS" (I think it's F2, I'll check the next time I 
see it again), but when you press F2, it gives you a BIOS name and some 
copyright junk or something (I don't remember exactly what it is other 
than it's just simple useless junk), and there are *no settings*!!!!  I 
suspect the problem is related to the old boot-up order that a lot of 
computers came with - 1) Floppy; 2) HDD; 3) CD.  If I could change it to 
1) CD; 2) HDD; & 3) Floppy, that would be nice, but the bloody machine's 
BIOS has no user settings!!!

> 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. 
>  

I do have Knoppix, and I have tried to use it - but when the machine 
locks onto the floppy, it ignores everything else!  It won't look at the 
CD drive and it won't look at the hard drive.

> 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. 
>  

Ah.... now that's an interesting possibility!  Thank you for bending my 
mind in that direction!  If only I could set the BIOS to boot the 
machine first and foremost from the HDD, then it probably wouldn't 
matter one way or the other though.....

> 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. 
>  

Yes... I'm not afraid of open-machine surgery on desktops, but I had a 
small fleet of 486 DynaBook laptop computers before that the floppy 
drives died on one by one - and at one point I came into possession of a 
486 DynaBook with a (physically) broken screen but nearly new everything 
else, so I tried to transplant the good floppy drive from it into one of 
the other (identical model) DynaBooks.  I was dismayed at how difficult 
it was to get the thing out... I did it, but I ended up physically 
damaging the parts machine to it.  When I got to the install phase in 
the working DynaBook, I found myself faced with the same barriers and 
didn't want to break up a still working machine, so I abandoned the 
attempt.  If I were certain about the cause with this NEC laptop, I 
might attempt it, but - for now - I'm just leaving the machine running 
24 hours a day... which brings up a question:

What sort of life expectancy is typical for a laptop hard drive running 
24 hours a day?  I probably should change the performance settings so 
that the machine can give the hard drive a rest while the machine is 
just idling.  I tried that once on a desktop, but it dragged the 
performance of the machine down so badly I gave up and went back to 
"never-sleep" for the hard drive.

> > [LHS] 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. 

Well... yeah... it's certainly true that flashing the BIOS can ruin a 
computer, but with some old Dell's I'm using, being able to upgrade the 
BIOS made it possible to use large hard drives - which was essential to 
making the machines into something useful.  That d*** NEC with no BIOS 
settings at all and no upgrades from NEC tells me "Never 
ever-ever-ever-ever-ever buy an NEC computer!  (I didn't buy the one I 
have BTW, it was given to me.

Lyle