• NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.

Computer Problems, v4.o

Anime Kidd

Explorer
Again! I arrive top bring news of another computer problem. Rejoice and laugh at my ways! :( But I truly hate to keep posting my problems here (no other boards I go to can help), but I have two laptops, both the same kind (NEC Versa 4000C) but one has Win95 and the other 98.

Anyways, the 98 one just won't start up. I think the battery is shot and won't hold a charge anymore. Sometimes it works, but most of the time it doesn't do anything.

The 95 one has a more serious problem then a faulty battery. When I start it up it has an error of "Failure Fixed Disk 0". It tells me to run Phdisk /Create command or some such, but I can't get into DOS to do it. I'm guessing the hard drive crashed.

Also, both computers, when they did work, had a "Bad CMOS Checksum" error requiring me to enter Setup and load the default CMOS settings everytime it starts.

Is it possible for me to switch the HDs and still have them work? I don't think it will cause of the different OSs of each one.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

Well, I've dabbled in notebook necromancy a few times, so here are a couple of thoughts, for what it's worth.

The 98 one's battery is probably kaput but I don't think that's the end of your worries. The fact that it works intermittently suggests something else is wrong but I have no idea what it might be.

It also sounds like the 95's hard disk has kicked the bucket. I doubt putting it the 98 machine will help. It may be worth putting the 98's hard drive in the 95 machine though. The difference in OS probably won't matter at all, with the possible exception of a few BIOS settings.

Getting CMOS checksum errors on every startup would make me suspicious of the mainboard batteries in both machines.

As you have two of the same model, I wish you well in getting at least one of them working satisfactorily again. Good luck.
 
Last edited:

That sucks. :( I'm not to worried about the 95 'cause I never really used it much, but the 98 has a few things I've been writing and I hadn't taken them off yet.
11zpissed.gif
Anyways, Thanks for the quick reply.
 

A dead battery on the 98 machine shouldn't stop it from working if you've got it plugged into the wall, unless there's also a problem with the power adapter. I can tell you from firsthand experience that they sometimes get shorts in them and will only work when the cable is bent a certain way.

It does sound like the 95 computer has a bad hard disk. If you can make a bootable floppy disk you might be able to salvage it with fdisk or a simple reformat. If not, replacement laptop hard drives are available, but I'm not sure about getting one with a low enough capacity to be compatible with a computer that would've had Windows 95 on it.

If all you need out of the 98 machine is recovery of the data from the hard disk, there are adapters available which will allow you plug a laptop hard drive into a desktop computer where you could copy the files over.

Off the top of my head I don't have any advice about the CMOS Checksum error. Do you also find that you have to reset the the clocks on both computers every time you get that error? I ask because (on desktops anyway) the battery that saves the CMOS settings is the same battery that powers the clock.

Assuming they're exactly the same computer in all specs except for one being 95 and the other 98, you probably would be able to put the 98 hard disk into the 95 machine and have it work. However before you do that I'm going to suggest something simpler. First try the power adapter from the 95 machine on the 98 one. If that works, try the battery from the 95 machine on the 98 one.

If it gets to the point of swapping hard drives I'd take a look at websites which sell laptop hard drives. Several I've seen in the past (sorry no links handy, but I might could dig some up) included model-specific instructions for installing hard drives in laptops. This is important because laptops aren't as standardized in terms of interal construction as desktops are, and if you don't know what you're doing in a specific model it's easy to take out the wrong screw and have the whole machine come apart on you.
 

A few things for the 95 :
If this is a HD problem

-get a boot disk to boot from DOS. You can find some image disk here :
http://www.bootdisk.com/

-you can try MBRWORK for repairing your MBR and recover your partitions
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/downloads/MBRWORK.ZIP
there is a documentation here : http://members.shaw.ca/LeesPlace/mbrwork.htm

It worked for me.


I don't know what the Bad CMOS is about, but I've googled this :
http://www.wintrouble.net/discus/messages/53/3117.html?1006967862


Good Luck



Chacal
 
Last edited:

Into the Woods

Remove ads

Top