Gateway PIII 450 prob

[fionandean]

My son has done something to his computer and I really need some help. He has a Gateway PIII i440bx chipset, 4m4pb0x1 bios (version 15A.0026.P14), is running 256mb ram and has a 60g h/drive which used to! have win98se on it. I put the computer together myself and until recently everything was running fine. Byron took exception to a password I put into the bios and in his efforts to remove it, has caused a real problem. First of all the computer would not boot up - it brought up the windows screen then stopped saying something about being unable to write to drive c. I downloaded some diagnostic tools from Seagate and checked the drive with scandisk. Both said the disk was fine but there were probs with file allocation and misreported drive size - I didn't seem to be able to fix these and still could not get windows to start. I decided to reformat and reinstall but although the computer wld say the format was done, when I went back in, it was the same as it had been before. I tried to install XP - formatting went fine but there were checksum errors when I tried to install. I was thinking maybe was a harddrive error by this time but moved the harddrive to another computer to see how it went there. This time - using the same floppy as before, formating went fine... I moved the hard drive back but still can't install 98 - I am told a serious disk error has occurred while writing to drive C. The conclusion I have come to is that either he has knocked or changed something on the motherboard itself or in the bios settings. (Unfortunately he doesn't know himself) The boot sector write protect is off btw. I have had alot of trouble finding information on either this sort of situation or the motherboard itself. Needless to say, if he EVER touches the inside of his computer again, I will find it a new home (and I won't say what I will do to him!) Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated
Fiona

[street1]

The most common cause of checksum errors in CMOS is a battery that is losing power. Viruses can also affect CMOS settings, and motherboard problems can also affect the stored values

[leezer3]

First, open up the side of the case & try to re-seat the IDE cables. If you have spares around try these as well, just to eliminate one problem from the equation. Then head into the BIOS & load the optimised defaults & see what happens.

The other thing that occurs to me is whether the BIOS natively supports 60GB drives, or whether you were running some sort of a proggie that allowed it to support the drive- If one of these has gone kaput, then you might want to try a full format, as opposed to a quick format.

Cheers

-Leezer-