Baslinux mailing list

[baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org]

Have you checked the power supply thoroughly?  If it's even very 
slightly dodgy it might be enough to run a good drive happily but 
cause a slightly sticky one to fail on boot.  Drives which have sat 
unused for a while may have become sticky.

Cheers,  Rob

On Thu, 25 Sep 2008, baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

> > The BIOS does detect the hard drive, and the CMOS settings has the hard
> > drive as the primary boot device.
>
> > I'll have to try the boot floppy and see if it boots from the hard drive. If
> > not, I'll search around my parts bin for another drive.
>
> Just about any size laptop drive would work (30MB or up).
>
> > > I have run into lots of hard drives that won't boot.  We fixed one
> > > recently by typing fdisk /mbr from DOS - partition table was messed up.
> > > Others simply have wornout boot sectors.
> >
> >
> > I think the boot sector is either worn out or corrupt on both hard drives,
> > but this computer apparently wasn't used very often and only had one install
> > of Windows 95 on it, so I don't see why it would be.
>
> I wonder if they just oxidize with age.  I have had 'good' drives given to
> me and as soon as I partitioned, formatted, and copied files, the boot
> sector went bad.  9 of one batch of 10 were bad or went bad, 1-2GB.
>
>
> > Sindi
> > >
> >
> > Joe