Old Pentium Bootup Problems

[barlav]

I've had an old Pentium 266 Mhz lying around and I'm trying to get it running. It has a generic Motheboard. I can access BIOS without any problems. When I go to restart it does the memory check and then detects the correct hard drive and cd rom drive and then it just hangs. After about 5 mintues it starts to beep. One continuous long beep. Is this PC toast? Is there anything I can try to get it working? Thanks! 🙂

 

[EvilDonnyboy]

Pentium 266 doesn't exist.

You must be talking about a Pentium 2 or an AMD cpu.

 

[barlav]

Pardon me. Pentium II. Now, how about a suggestion on how to solve the problem at hand?

 

[EvilDonnyboy]

I'll assume ur using win98. Try putting in a Start-up disk, to troubleshoot.

 

[barlav]

Yes. I'm using windows 98 but it doesn't make it that far. It hangs after cd rom and hard drive are detected.

 

[BigLance]

Un hook the CD-ROM
Try another Hard Drive
Check to see if the floppy drive is causing problems, remove it in the BIOS
Reset the BIOS to fail-safe or similiar settings
Change the First, Secon, Third etc. Bootup Devices around.
Disable Virus Checking
Check hard drive in another computer

Maybe one of the above tips will help you out ? Good Luck ...

 

[barlav]

Thanks for your suggestions BigLance. I tried everything. I tried a different hard drive, cd rom and floppy drives as well as tried every different combination of the 3 and I get the same result. It just hangs after the memory checks and drive detections. After about 5 minutes it beeps in one continous tone. So, do you think the motherboard is bad? Thanks!

 

[barlav]

Got it. I needed to blank out the CMOS. Works great now (For a 266 that is 🙂)