Dell complaints

[hotrodlincoln]

My 7 year old PII 400 PC running 98SE has been acting up at startup lately. Once or twice a week it will boot & get almost all the way to the point of putting the icons on the desktop; however, at that point the screen remains black and the cursor is just a white underscore blinking in the upper lefthand corner. Usuall a reboot to Safe Mode, then another reboot to Normal goes through - but sometimes it takes 2 Safe -> Normal cycles to fully boot properly.

My first impulse is that either the motherboard battery is dying, or that the power supply is going, because they're both original parts I really don't know if this is a correct guess.

Hey, Rocke, since we basically have the same Dimension machines, do you have any ideas as to what's happening and/or how to correct it?

Hotrodlincoln
moderator

[StrangeFarer]

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

Sup Linc? Strange's guesses are as good as mine. The only bug mine has (and has always had) is that once every third month, some otherwise well-meaning input (like a mouseclick) gets interpreted as a press of the reset button.

WME was notorious for doing what you described though. It had to do with drivers initializing their hardware, if they got an answer they didn't expect, it locked the whole sumbitch up and 'black screen w/cursor' was as far as it got. A thumb on the audio chip would sometimes make it start. I 'thought' ME was the introduction of Microshaft's 'driver signing' initiative, and never had that symptom associated with SE until just now.

If XP does that, yeh--corruption.

I do open Khan every other year and sweep out the spiderwebs, but I don't disconnect anything (if it's working, don't fix it).
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[sickofdell]

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

Thanks, Sickof. Out of thousands of failed systems, I never saw the USB symptom, the BSFC (black screen/flashing cursor) always went away when a known-good image was substituted. I'm sure it can happen though, something to watch for. Don't know if a 7-year-old Dell can optionally boot from USB.

That's the trouble with computers, eh? There's just too many dang things that can go wrong.

Linc, when this happens, we have the luxury of booting to mini-W98 on floppy and seeing if the harddrive is accessible. CTL-ALT-DEL (don't cycle power) and see what you get (assuming FDD is first boot device). If C-A-D doesn't respond, that tells us something too (locked up at BIOS level).

If W98 finds a discrepancy in the registry, it is supposed to like, say something. Auto-invoke scandisk, or something. So, just restarting doesn't fix it, you have to go through safemode to get it working again? It's going to be kinda hard to pin this down, since we don't know what is causing it to happen, or to STOP happening.
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[FallenAngel]

If it stops at a blinking cursor, this is the very last stage before software takes over completely. The last driver that is stuck is AGP4XX.SYS (the XX represents any number between 00 and 99).

Your drivers aren't loading properly. That screen is typically transparent or negligibly visible during a "good boot" that we're all used to. If it's a good boot, then the next screen you'd see is the blue XP Welcome screen (for example). For Win9x the next screen would be the Network Login screen/prompt.

Trust me on this.

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

[Blaze]

Kill everything in Startup in MSCONFIG and see if the problem still occurs. Also disconnect any peripherals. Flash the BIOS to latest version.

For decent memory diags :

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

http://www.memtest86.com/

I strongly doubt that this has anything to do with hardware though.

[FallenAngel]

If bad sectors are suspected, even remotely, run SCANDISK and place checks next to Repair.

I can't remember exactly what it says but I know the option is there. It's the child of CHKDSK.

I say child because we all know Windows NT came first and was NT based architecture

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

Just to keep us confused, BillyBoy changes the designation every generation. CHKDSK was a DOS command. In XP it's back to being 'the' Windows disk utility, after a turn telling you how full your drive was (and nothing else) in W98.

Unfortunately, if the sector can be read well enough to copy, no matter how many tries it takes (until IDE times out), scandisk calls it 'good'. It won't identify or move marginal sectors. The sector may not actually BE bad, but the data marginalized by repeated adjacent writes over 7 years.

Scandisk's tolerance for error/retries is the same as any other Windows application (IDE timeout) once Windows is RUNNING. During boot though, WXP takes read errors WAY too seriously. It WON'T try again, it will either say "missing or corrupt" or just sit there.

Linc, how long has it been since you defragged? If you're lucky, marginal sectors get read and rewritten such that they're no longer marginal. W98 defrag is flaky, it often won't ever finish unless you run it in safemode, and then it locks the OS when you close it. That was definitely fixed in WME, as well as running several times faster (unless your startups constantly update, as some do). Whether the fix was in for W98SE or not...?
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[FallenAngel]

SCANDISK as a DOS based command can be run from DOS environment. Make a Win9x bootable floppy and get the A:>\

The command executes like any other but be sure to /? as a switch to see what additional options you have.

I wish I could recall them for you but nay. Having done this myself on known bad drives (this was all hypothetical until then) I can say that it's highly effective in marking and moving bad sectors. Sad part is, it's brutally long and you get to actually see (with yellow blocks or red can't remember) what sectors are bad.

Try that and see if it helps any. DEFRAG can and should be run from Safe Mode as there's minimal processes in the background, BUT it will still stop 10 times and produce that generic "Windows has stopped 10 times etc etc etc" error.

Not sure if it can also be run in DOS...hmm.

[hotrodlincoln]

Over the past week, I've been following the advice that has been given in this thread. Thank you all.

- the BIOS has been flashed to the latest version
- I ran SCANDISK with Repair option checked on both hard drives (each of which has 3 partitions). The C:\ drive had no bad sectors, but the second hard drive whose primary partition is my D:\, had some bad sectors which were repaired. Total Scandisk run time was several days.
- Defragged all partitions. Again, total run time was several days.

Right now I'm running Memtest. It's been running for 11 1/2 hours now, and I'm beginning to think that it has a problem. Unless I read it wrong, the Readme.txt file that came with Memtest said required tests 1 - 7 should take less than 6 hours. That's based upon a 366 Celeron with 64 Meg RAM; my PC is a 400 PII with 256 RAM, so maybe everything is still working - just that it will take way longer than expected.

I'll keep everyone here informed.

Hotrodlincoln

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

Dell Diag (ptoooie) memtest? Or WMD (Windows Memory Diagnostic). Only WMD tests memory similar to the way Windows uses it. Memory that will bomb Windows boot, WILL PASS DELL DIAG.

WMD is a free download to a bootable floppy from Microshaft.

P.S. It is uncharacteristic (though not impossible) for memory that has worked fine for 7 years to suddenly stop. Same with 'seating', though since you're having problems, you risk little by removing the sticks, wiping the contact fingers with contact-restorer solution (using LINTLESS wipes), and can-air-dusting the inside of the MB connectors. I do NOT recommend this as 'routine maintenance' on a system that is WORKING. (If it works, don't fix it.)
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[FallenAngel]

I think the Memtest is not the Dell branded one, or the WMDiag, but the one from memtest.org.

[hotrodlincoln]

- after running Memtest86 for over 12 hours;
- after removing and reseating my two 128 Mg RAM SIMMS;
- after removing and replugging in all of my power cables
- after removing and replugging in my HD ribbon cable
- after blasting the inside of the case with compressed air
- after disabling everything except the PNY USB drive, AVG Antivirus and Zone Alarm firewall in the Startup configuration ...

Last night at bootup it still did the same thing: went almost all the way to completion where I can see my background .JPG and icons, but stopped at the black screen with a blinking underscore cursor in the upper left corner of the monitor.

Perhaps it is a software issue. However, this is an old box that DOES NOT get software installed on it regularly. I last put something new on it about two years ago. Only AVG Antivirus gets updated 2 - 3 times a week, and Zone Alarm gets updated every few months. THAT'S IT!

I'm tempted to get a new case, power supply, motherboard with AMD CPU and memory, then install the floppy, CD R/W and hard drives from the current box into it, just to see what happens. I DO NOT WANT TO GO THROUGH THE NIGHTMARE OF RE-INSTALLING EVERYTHING ONTO A NEW BOX!!! Besides, some of my software is so old, I'm afraid that a new CPU and BIOS will prevent them from working properly, let alone praying that I have all of the floppies and CDs for everything.

Thoughts? Comments?