Ok, first things first. Be sure not to jump the gun with a BIOS/CMOS FLASH. If you happen to get the wrong one you're basically dead in the water and not much is gonna rescue you. And even the right FLASH can screw things up royally. FLASHING is left as a last resort.

> Okay, so I've been having a strange intermittent hardware failure, which a few minutes ago became a MAJOR failure. Previously, I'd be in Win98, and have the file manager constantly windowed (which I'm aware opens more than 300 files to do its job). Then my HDD would seem to freeze with the access light lit continuously, and while it was doing so, it would also jump back and forth to accessing my CD-ROM -- even though I don't keep my CD-ROM loaded with any disk. Weird.

On a healthy machine, this is called paging, and can be fixed with the addition of RAM. It just simply doesn't have a large enough paging (swap) file to accomplish all it wants to do. A bit more RAM will usually clear this right up. As for your machine, if this is part of the same problem you described further down it could be something else, but probably not.

>
> Frankly, it sounded like my IDE cable(s) had gotten loose from the motherboard, but I've checked and everything's secure. While I was at it, I disconnected the 24x CD-ROM -- on the off-hand chance that that's the part that's defective (or so Dave's been claiming for months).

Bad CD-ROM was going to be my guess. If you have disconnected it and are still having errors, but not the same one(s) did you change the jumper of the hard drive it was connected to? If the HDD was Master w/Slave present, did you change it to Master/Single? If the HDD was set to Slave, did you change it to Master or Master/Single? The drive should have a diagram.

>
> The dumb part now is that when I go through the CMOS self-check, where it Auto-Detects the HDD's first and then boots them, the CMOS is now detecting "Primary & Secondary Slave: None". I did make sure to go the CMOS setup and change the boot sequence from "C,CDROM,A" to "C only", but that made no difference. Also, I don't recall that the HDD LED light is supposed to be "on" all the time during the RAM check during the self-test, even *before* the boot sequence...

I do know that it comes on and stays on for a while. All machines are different, and I'm sure this time varies, but it does come on.

>
> Question (1a): What's going on here? My Bios is toast? I've got an Award Bios version 1.0a on probably an ASUS Pentium 233 mainboard, with somewhat newer Western Digital and Maxtor HDDs.

(Ans. 1a)Probably not. But even if it is, AWARD is pretty simple to find info. for upgrades on. The actual FLASH might be a bit tricker to find. www.windrivers.com is a good place to find BIOS updates. But again, use with caution.

(1b) Could a messed-up CD-Rom connection or driver have really led to all this? I thought not, but...

(Ans. 1b)Connection? Maybe. Driver? Again maybe, but probably not. Bad drive? Yes, but in any case disconnecting it should have cleared it up if it was the sole problem.

(2) WHAT EXACTLY is the CMOS *doing* when it auto-detects the HDDs? If it tries to get a response from the ID-FAT from the HDDs and not getting anything, then I'm toasted because the main HDD could be fried. But surely not both drives.

(Ans. 2) From my understanding of things, what you described is exactly what it does. But some drives are wierd. For example, most WD's need to have the jumpers set across pins 3 and 5 for Master/Single even though that is not on the diagram on the drive. If you're running WD's you might try that.

(3) Why the heck does my CMOS think both my Masters are Slaves? True -- I don't have any Slaves. But it's never had problems doing Auto-Detect before... Though it *did* always read my WD as "Matsumi 4something" and the Maxtor as "None".

(Ans. 3) Again, I'd make sure the jumper settings are in order. Connect each HDD to it's own IDE controller as Master/Single. Save the BIOS FLASH as long as is possible, and hard set the drives in BIOS instead of Auto Detect. Hopefully that'll get you going. If it does, you might take your CD-ROM drive in somewhere to be tested to see if maybe it needs replacing. If not then you might contact someone locally who can run some diags on this machine to try to pin-point the problem.

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> Wolf "aaaarrggh... I can't STAND the peripheral conflicts created by plug 'n play, gimme jumpers any day" spirit

Drac "Any other ideas?" imaS