[RESOLVED] Cyrix CPU; SIS MB; won't go into win95

[Xavier]

The PC is- Cyrix 100GP, SIS motherboard (i am not sure what type as it is and older one with and amibios); 3 gig seagate drive.

My boss was useing her pc (its her home one that she uses to connect to our AS/400) on thursday night and it gave a registry error and said to restart windows (it had been fine up to this point). It was locked up at this point and so she had to reset it manually. After the restart it booted into windows extemely slowly and gave an error saying there was something wrong with the registry. After a couple of more atempts (she is a novice pc user) it would not go into windows at all.
I got back this tuesday and have be frustrated since and I think I have the problem narrowed down to the MB. It seems to be reading the HD extremely slowly but the HD works great in another PC. I tried another chip in the MB and still the same problemly. The ram has tested to be fine. BIOS set to defaults doesnt help. I got it to boot once into windows great (but slowly and everything is ok registry was as icons and desktop we the way they are supposed to be) but froze and i have been unable to produce the results. IT reads the HD slow even when going throught the autoexec.bat and config.sys and doesn't matter if I boot to a command prompt or with a floppy. So is it the motherboard or soemthing I am missing.
Thanks for reading this

Luke

[clauded]

hi,first try a diagnostic program to check your cache memory,i would think your level2 memorys are shot or even the level 1 cpu cache,
cheers,Clauded

[schultzz]

I'm curious...what diagnostic programs do you recommend for checking cache? Do you know of any shareware/freeware that are fairly reliable?

[CompuDocs]

I had a problem once with a real slow boot, couldn't figure it out for a long time. In these days of Pentium class machines, I forgot to check the Turbo switch. Sure enough that was it!

Maybe the same thing?

Worth a try, anyway.

Charlie

[Xavier]

No it is not the turbo switch

I may have something to do with it detecting the hard drive wrong I think. Does that mean its a corrupted bios? When I put the seagate drive which is detected as 3227MB in my good PC but in the broken one its detected as haveing 3078MB. The same thing for a diffenrt drive which gets a disk I/O error in the cyrix? Weird.

I am pretty sure that its not the L1 or L2 caches as disabling them doesn't do anything.
thanks for the replys

[JeanneD]

maybe you could try ez-bios if nothing else works....since the cmos is not reading the drive right

[gnslngr]

Go here for memory benchmark programs:
www.miro.pair.com/tweakbios/index.html
Then click on the "Benchmark Progs" link in the lower left corner of the page.
You"ll find some freebies there.

[stevet]

Your hardware might be OK. Since the problem started with the Win95 registry, I would suspect your trouble is software related. This may be pretty time-consuming, but a reformat and a clean install of Windows should clear up your problems.

Steve

[Xavier]

It was definately something with the hardware as when I put in a clean new 4.2 gig hard drive it still did a very slow boot and then gave a disk I/O error. Very strange but what isn't with those wacky cyrix chips

Thanks for all the help though.

We ended up giving her a new PC with the old HD. No reinstalling windows or anything I just went into safe mode (on the new PC) and then deleted all of the items on the system part of the devive manager and then a couple of restarts and everything was peachy-keen.