Re: Rest Bios?

Grendal wrote:
> I have a Dell Dimension 2400 with a suspected bias problem. When I turn
> on the computer I see the Dell splash screen (jittery) and then a
> message saying my drives cannot be found. But when I hit F1 to
> "continue" the drives are found and my XP Pro works perfectly. I used a
> floppy to attempt to "flash" the bios but the problem persists. Any
> ideas. Can I pull out the battery or reset some pins or something. I
> don't want to brick this thing though!
>
I have one system which tells me that overclocking failed and speed was set back
to default, even though the system is not overclocked. Happens only on cold
boot, not warm. In my case, it seems likely that the power supply is marginal,
the BIOS too dumb to power up drives one at a time and wait a few hundred ms for
them to spin up, and the jittery video is an artifact of marginal p/s voltage.

If it happens to you only at cold boot, that's a possible reason. I would (did)
live with it, as long as I know what it is I don't worry. Any upgrade I might
ever want to put in that box would be a lower power CPU and/or disk, so unless
the p/s fails I will ignore it.

Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Grendal wrote:
>
>> I have a Dell Dimension 2400 with a suspected bias problem. When I turn
>> on the computer I see the Dell splash screen (jittery) and then a
>> message saying my drives cannot be found. But when I hit F1 to
>> "continue" the drives are found and my XP Pro works perfectly. I used a
>> floppy to attempt to "flash" the bios but the problem persists. Any
>> ideas. Can I pull out the battery or reset some pins or something. I
>> don't want to brick this thing though!
>>
> I have one system which tells me that overclocking failed and speed was
> set back to default, even though the system is not overclocked. Happens
> only on cold boot, not warm. In my case, it seems likely that the power
> supply is marginal, the BIOS too dumb to power up drives one at a time
> and wait a few hundred ms for them to spin up, and the jittery video is
> an artifact of marginal p/s voltage.
>
> If it happens to you only at cold boot, that's a possible reason. I
> would (did) live with it, as long as I know what it is I don't worry.
> Any upgrade I might ever want to put in that box would be a lower power
> CPU and/or disk, so unless the p/s fails I will ignore it.

FWIW, I have that same issue on an old EPOX board with an AMD Athlon.
If I reset the BIOS after it warms up, it will run at full speed.
Otherwise, it fails.