DIM on boot -up

[TIM PRYOR]

Windows 98 system om boot-up, will go through start-up but when it gets to checking my DIM pool, i get an error message
"System disc not found, replace and press any key" but no matter what i do it just scrolls and repeats that error message.

[John Prophet]

Welcome to the forum! sorry to hear about the troubles

sounds sorta like the hard drive died.

If you go into the bios....(usually by clicking "del" during bootup)..see if it shows the hard drive as being detected...go to "standard cmos settings" (or standard, or whatever your bios calls it) and put the setting for primary IDE drive on "auto"...reboot and see if it finds the hard drive then.

also you can just look at the black bios screens and see if it ever detects the drive..or does it give you that message before it ever shows a drive being detected?

JP

[Peter M]

This is AFTER it's reviewed the DIM pool. The message tells you that your main mass storage has gone south, no more bootable operating system found. Nothing to do with DIM at all - it's just that the DIM area update is the last thing it actually got done before failing to find a bootable storage device.

[John Prophet]

by 'DIM" we are actually meaning "DMI" yes?

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one thing to do to sorta confirm is to boot with a floppy....run "fdisk" and if there is no hard drive present it will promptly tell you "no fixed disk present"

you can get w98se boot disks from www.bootdisk.com

[TIM PRYOR]

YEP! Does happen after the boot-up, as passed the DIM pool. but then will not proceed on-wards, so if it nothing to do with the DIM. how can i proceed.

[John Prophet]

I told you want to do, lol. If the hard drive is not showing up in the bios..or if it wont show up when u boot from a floppy and run fdisk.....then it is probably a dead hard drive....the only real other possibility is if the ide cable to the hard drive is bad or the motherboard IDE controller could be bad.

you have 2 ide controllers on the motherboard where the IDE cables plug into...if the #1 controller is bad it might give the same result as if the hard drive itself died.....so you could try to swap the cable on the board so that the hard drive is then plugged into the SECONDARY IDe controller on the motherboard. Then maybe go into the bios and set the secondary master on "auto".

I have a computer with a dead primary IDE controller...I had to do the exact thing I just described....of course at first I thought the hard drive itself had died cuz it said "primary hard drive failure" but it was really the ide controller on the motherboard...so I plugged the hard drive into the secondary contoller and it worked fine.

Thats just something to try...and if it doesnt work it really tells you the hard drive itself is dead.

JP

[Peter M]

DMI, yes, of course. I was working on something called DIM today