Old Compaq not booting...

[Bridger]

Well, I got an old Compaq Presario 5184 from about '96 or '97, and it worked fine for about a week. I reformatted it, put Mepis (linux) on it, replaced the system battery (because the clock was lagging), and added two old 32 Meg sticks to the 128 that it had. The first time I booted after the memory was installed, it detected it fine, and counted it up to get about 188MB.

A couple of boots after that, it was fine, but then I was copying some of my music to it through an ethernet cable, and it gave me a message that I ran out of hard drive space. I doubt that it actually did, though. It has a 4GB hard drive, and even if the OS took up 3GB of it, I would still be able to have 500MB of music on it. When it gave me the message, it froze, and I had to turn it off manually.

Now for some reason, when I boot it up, it shows the "Compaq" logo, and the bios information, but then it re-counts the memory. I know on some older machines it does this by default, but it didn't to this before. After it gets doen counting the memory, it turns itself off.

Does anyone know what might be causing this?

Thanks,
Bridger

 

[CrossCech]

what os is running on it? maybe it has something to do with virtual memory, which is space from your hard drive that acts as additional memory & works in conjunction with your ram. I would tend to believe that you ran out of hard drive space if you're thinking you have around 500 mb available. When the hard drive gets down to it last few hundred mb of space, it tends to let you know you need to do something about it ... like remove stuff or defrag. Or put in a bigger slave drive.

About it not booting ... try taking out the additional 32mb sticks you put in and return it back to original state and see if that works. Those old sticks might be faulty. Is the 128mb compaq memory or aftermarket? There were some compaq models that required proprietary memory.

 

[r53s]

Run your 'Classic' baby with the 128 stick alone, and tell us how it's going...
And also if you're running W95 or W98...

 

[Bridger]

I'm running mepis, which is a distribution of Linux. I'll try opening it up and taking out the memory. It could be the swap file (virtual memory) that would take up extra space. Then I'll try to boot it up, and see what happens.

 

[Kage]

Yeah, the memory could be it.

By any chance could you make your sig 5 lines or less?

 

[Bridger]

Okay, it's officially dead. It won't even turn on now. Any more ideas?

 

[Kage]

Its your motherboard then I'm afraid, or even your CPU I'm sorry more likely going to be your motherboard though...

I'd assume its not even worth fixing that one up now. I'd buy a new PC, and then put the hard drive into the new one and back up files. Or even take the hard drive to a mates, transfer so you have the stuff and then wait until you can get a new one.

I hope this helps

 

[CrossCech]

Sorry bridger ... I read it in your original post, but plumb forgot that you were running Mepis. Still think it's a memory issue.

 

[CrossCech]

do the led lights come on? perhaps now your power supply is screwy.

 

[Bridger]

LEDs do nothing. Could be the PS, but who knows. I don't have any valuable information on it, I didn't get that far. Oh, well. Town yard sale's this August. Plenty of old junky computers out there.