what to do if machine hangs at BIOS?

hi everyone, i have a pentium 400 celeron old machine and i am trying to change the boot sequence and when i change it and go to save the settings it hangs and i have to switch it off at the wall. How do i stop this from happening as the HDD is new with no operating system on or no partition yet. The machine was OEM from packard bell. The bios is AMibios 1.17 if that helps? Will clearing the CMOS help? How do i get a bios upgrade and install it?

please advise ASAP! I need this machine up and running!!!

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Comments

pandimus

Can you flash the bios? Another thing to try is to see if it is having problem with some hardware. go down to bare machine and give it a whirl. CPU, Ram and videocard.

If that dont work come on back and we will see what we can do

RussS

I agree with stripping it and going from there, however I suggest leaving a BIOS flash until all is either working or there is no other choice. If things turn to custard during the BIOS flash your chip could be toast.

Go down to bare bones and work your way back up and I think you will find that a bad card is causing this.

pandimus

Good point, didnt think of that.. Also yeah, clear your cmos, see what happens.. Couldnt hurt..

seth223uk

thanks for the help guys, funny thing is ive bin running xp on it fine with no probs apart from it hangs when i shut it down i thought that may be down to te hardware not being compatible with the newer OS.

i wanted to clear the cmos but dont know the location of the CMOS jumer as its an old ish board with no manual etc i do know that its an amibios 1.17 and celeron 400mhz.

pandimus

Just remove and replace the battery

seth223uk

good idea ill try it and tell you how it goes

bellboy

did it boot up with its orignial hdd okay?

have you tried using different ram?

seth223uk

yes original spec completely apart from bit more ram but it was the same b4 i added the ram so thats not the problem i think. I dunno what to do to get the bios to save settings without crashing now cos if i exit without saving its fine. i want to be able to change boot sequence so i can install windows etc

pandimus

hmm new ram? you have the old stuff? Ive heard of messed up ram causing funny problems.. IF you can install old stuff give it a whirl.

seth223uk

if it was ram it would affect the whole system wouldnt it?

pandimus

Umm, sometimes you just get random errors. I had a computer that seemed to run fine, but every once in ahwhile, i would get blue screens and random lockups. Changed ram, worked fine.