did my love die?
 

I recieved an old 486 labtop. Specifics: AST 486sx/25 Color. Last night, i tried to boot up from a slackware bootup floppy. It worked alright except for the fact the kernel wouldn't start.

This morning, I tried again but i ran into an even worse problem. I will boot up the labtop and the bios will pop up, but as soon as it tries to boot up the harddrive, it just turns off?! this is so wierd. If any of you could give me some help, thank you a millions!

You could check to so if it will boot from something other than the hard drive. Try booting
tomsrtbt in the floppy. If you have a CD-ROM try booting knoppix or an install CD.


___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

i cannot figure out what button to press to get into the bios, so im not sure what order everything is booting. My cd-rom for this thing goes through the parallel port (firewire?? dunno) and cant boot anything as far as i can see. I have tried putting different floppys tho, like win98 startup and slackware bootup disk.

Maybe if i could get into the bios, this would help out...

btw the bios only shows a logo, so i cannot figure out the button.

F2, delete or F8
Those are standard. You can try F1 or escape too. But the top 3 work 99.9% of the time.
Just keep typing it in while you see the logo for the bios.. even before :), and you'll get to the bios :)

i tried those 4 teval (thx for that tip, useful on other pc's) but it didn't work :(
I pressed it about every 3 seconds and it popped up with a "Keyboard Stuck Error"

I think one of those would work, but it just shuts off before anything can happen. The strangest thing is the fact that it shuts off and doesn't stop to tell me an error or anything. Thank you guys, the help is much appreciate

Have you checked the CMOS battery it may be dead. I've never had one die on me but you never know.

I have..
That doesn't have the same effect though. The CMOS just doesn't remember values.

YAY! got it fixed :) the 14.4k antique modem i had was plugged in as one of the those credit card thing cards or w/e. (somebody please let me know what there called) but i guess that was not letting it work. thx for the input guys

PCMCIA cards.

Good work! :)
I'll have to remember that, that's how a laptop responds to that.
Thank you very much for posting what the problem was. Everyone hates it when someone ends a thread with.. "Fixed it" and doesn't say how. Makes the thread uselss for future reference. :)