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Old AST Premmia GX P90 problem

S

speedlever

Senior member
I'm doing some volunteer work trying to help resurrect some old donated PCs. We have about 20 of these boxes and no docs at all. They are generally equipped with a 528 Mb HD and a SCSI adapter with a SCSI NEC 4x CDROM and some other goodies. The mobo has a SCSI connector running from near the AT power connector to near the middle of the board. I have no idea what that's for. The mobo also has a riser where the PCI and ISA slots are found.

Anyway, we're taking out the SCSI adapters and CDROMs and replacing them with EIDE CDs since the old NECs require a CD carrier. We're also replacing the Hd with at least a 1 Gb HD and installing W95C.

The problem I'm running into is that after replacing the CD and HD, I'm getting double beeps on POST and an error msg saying the HD adapter can't be found. The BIOS has been scoured for any setting that we think may affect that, but no joy. What we have discovered is that as soon as the EIDE CDROM is disconnected from the ribbon cable, the HD boots fine. It makes no difference which connector on the ribbon cable the HD is connected to; it boots from either spot as long as the CDROM is not connected.

I got one machine to run with no problems.. and the only difference I could readily tell is that the good machine had a BIOS version of 2.04. The bad machines so far have a 2.05 BIOS. Now even though the mobo has the same apparent model number, the boards differ slightly in that the board with BIOS 2.04 has an unused male connector (HDD to J13 or something) while the BIOS 2.05 boards do not.

These machines are so old that online info is sorta hard to come by.

Anyone here have any info that might help out?

Another problem I ran into on an old Micron P90 box is that at the end of W95 installation the machine reboots, gets to the W95 splash screen, then goes back to DOS prompt and asks something about needing command.com typed in or location for it or something to that effect. I can't change drives or anything to satisfy that prompt.

I looked at c:\command.com and found it to be a different file size and date from the one on the W98SE boot disk. I verified that command.com was the same file size/date on c:\ prior to installing W95. So I don't know when or how that is being changed.. nor how to fix it. Any thoughts on this? Is this my problem with the W95 boot?

Thanks!

 
Are the 528mb HD's SCSI? are the 1gB Hd's scsi? (I'm assuming not from your post).


It sounds like the system isn't configured for more than one IDE device. Is there any setting in the BIOS to allow another drive? (I seem to recall having to set some funky parameters for a 2x-cdrom I once had)

Sorry I couldn't provide any "help", but just a thought......
 
Thanks for the tips and pointers, guys.

Looks like the following may fix the problems we've been having.


>http://www.ari-service.com

Release 3.01 provides the following problem resolutions and enhancements:


PROBLEMS RESOLVED

Fixed Premmia GX problem of failing to warm boot with one IDE channel, if
onboard SCSI was enabled.

Fixed problem of failing to boot on systems with 2 drives on the same
channel.<

 
Update:

We extracted 3.01 to a floppy and tried using the existing BIOS's flash update (turn on the PC with the BIOS update floppy in the drive). No joy. I get 2 long beeps, then some diskette activity, and after 5 seconds or so, 3 short beeps and a blank screen.

Yank the disk out and reboot and BIOS 2.05 is still there.

Any ideas on how to make this work?

Thanks.

 
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