Got a boot problem with Smoothwall firewall.

[Migroo]

Our Smoothwal firewall is:

P166 MMX
64mb RAM
Intel chipset motherboard
1.2 Gb drive
Various ethernet cards

The machine has worked flawlessly for a year. Yesterday I noticed that the system 'clock' was out by ages, so I went to replace the battery on the motherboard. When I booted the machine back up, I reset the time (which it kept this time - good) and let it startup.. it didnt find the hard drive..

I would normally suspect a dead HDD, but it will find it easily enough in the BIOS (automatic IDE HDD detection). I have tried all 3 'modes' that are available - LBE, 'Normal', and another I forget the name of.

Nothing works! Help - any advice?

 

[Migroo]

Right, I've tried the HDD in a spare PC I have (PII350, BX board, 128mb ram etc) and it 'works' in that the drive is found and the PC starts to boot up, but of course the OS (Smoothwall) doesnt load (I guess its because of the different motherboard being present) and gives a Kernel panic.

Any ideas what I can do to rescue the other machine?

 

[Migroo]

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[r0tt3n1]

Not familiar with Smoothwall, but as for the hard drive, try removing the jumper from it and reboot. I assume it is the only hard drive, if there is a cdrom drive, put it on the secondary by itself. If ya havent already, in BIOS, select the `Load Setup Deafults` or similar and save and exit and see if that helps. Actually, might wanna do that first if ya havent already..... The drive info should be right on the drive itself, sectors heads etc... Load those manually into BIOS if need be. anyhoo, I'm babbling, I very tired...good luck.