[ILUG] What's up with my computer?

[Timothy Murphy]

My desktop has had trouble booting for some time,
and I suspect it may be getting to the end of its tether.
So I thought I'd appeal to the excellent gurus on this list
to cast some light on the matter.

In principle I never re-boot this machine
except on notable occasions.
The last time was when I had a fire in the house,
and the firemen turned off the power.
The time before was when I upgraded to Fedora-1.

In any case, the machine no longer seems to be able to boot
from the hard disk,
even when this is the first choice in the BIOS.
I've looked at the MBR on the hard disk,
and it seems perfectly good.
In any case, as far as I can tell from the LEDs
the machine doesn't even look there.
What it says is that it can't boot from the CD,
which is not surprising as there is no CD in the machine.
[It says this even when the CD is not on the list of boot devices
in the BIOS.]

So for about 1 year (this machine is about 4--5 years old)
I have booted from a floppy made with "mkbootdisk".
But during the last 2 episodes the machine has found difficulty with that.,
and has not tried to read from the floppy until I took extreme measures.

It has always been able to boot from CD 
(when this is listed as a boot device in the BIOS),
but I don't know if one can boot into the current system in that way?

The symptoms generally suggest to me that there is some problem
with the BIOS.
Could a battery on the motherboard getting tired cause this behaviour?
The motherboard incidentally is an Asus P2B-LS.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland