Hello again: I've resigned to the fact my 486 must be dead, the BIOS chip must have died as I cannot get it to flash no how. Now I have another question...I'm looking at a friends machine thats acting really odd. I just had to replace the HDD due to read errors, so after doing that, and reinstalling XP, etc, it worked fine for maybe 2 hrs. Now I'm getting a really strange problem. First of all, if I try and boot with something plugged into ANY of the USB ports it refuses to POST, just sits there with a black screen, hdd spins up, but thats it, no beep, no words on screen, nothing. If I unplug the mouse (or anything) from the USB ports then it POSTS fine, counts ram, etc, and attempts to boot, but freezes on the XP logo screen (the little bars go across about 3 times then lock). WHen this first started happening if I kept rebooting I could get it to fully boot eventually and then it'd be fine, even the USB would work IF I plugged it in after windows was loaded. Now however it seems to have gotton worse. It still refuses to POST with anything in the USB ports, and with nothing in them, it locks on the winXP logo all the time. No how can I get into windows. Even reinstalled windows yet again, still no go. And I know windows XP always worked on this machine, they had no problems up till the point the other hdd started to fail. What could be wrong now? I know the new hdd is good, just ran the diagnostic on it again to be sure, it was brand new replacement on warranty. I tried reseating the CPU and RAM to no avail. Is the mobo going south? This was a fairly new system, CPU and mobo were from an HP pavilion made in 2001, not that old, and hardly used, the person scrapped it cuz they needed more power. so I took the parts, and it was working fine for almost a year. Any ideas?? Thanks in advance, I love this forum, best place out there for computer technicians in my opinion. Jeff

Hi Jeff! Check the following: - Power Supply. - RAM - Verify that Hard drive is been detected in BIOS.

Go into the bios. When I get this problem, I change the plug'n'play aware setting from yes to no so it is managed by the bios. It could be hardware conflicts. Then boot into XP if it works fine, go back and change it to plug'n'play aware YES. See if it boots again. It should be on YES. But it doesn't always work that way.

Anyone happen to recall the model number of the Pavilions that used this chip? I want to try a BIOS upgrade but need the model to get the correct one. In my BIOS there is no setting for "plug&play aware OS", just a setting for what OS is installed. Since it is XP I tried both "win98/win2000" and "other", both behaved exactly the same.

Got my model info...and flashed the BIOS. It changed absolutely nothing. Still couldn't install XP, etc... However I noticed it seemed to be going awry when it went to install the sound card driver, so I pulled the card, and finally XP installed! So now I can boot to windows ok, but the USB problem still exists. I've tried everything I can think of with BIOS settings, what could be causing this strange USB behavior? Thanks, Jeff