🚀 go-pugleaf

After my BIOS got hosed by a win98 crash (see below), i have had a
problem booting up after an overnite of the system being turned off.

However, if i disable the 2 hard drives on the primary EIDE channel in
the BIOS setup and use a Linux boot floppy, i can get a perfectly fine
boot (the 3rd drive stays enabled in BIOS and causes no
problems). once that occurs, and after i re-enable the 2 primary hard
disks in the BIOS setup, all subsequent reboots work fine both to
linux and win98 (LILO) -- until the system is shut down overnite,
whence the problem returns.

The boot up failure proceeds through the POST test, the floppy drive
is accessed, the hard drive light comes on, then the system simply
hangs for while, then the BIOS announces a Hard disk(s) fail.

Once the OS boots, there are no visible problems with any of the hard
drives, so i am assuming there is a motherboard/BIOS problem --
perhaps something like a chip is leaking a charge during the overnite
off, but once the power comes on and a floppy boot happens, the chip
holds its charge and subsequent boots are fine. I havent determined
yet HOW LONG the system needs to be turned off before the boot failure 
occurs. 

The BIOS got hosed when a Shutdown from within windows 98 hung. I did
a Ctr-ALt-Del to reset, and after a short while the BIOS started
spitting out beeps like you would not believe. I rushed to push the
reset button, but by the time i got there, i had a message on my
screen saying THAT THE BIOS SETTINGS HAD BEEN ERASED!!!! i had to
rebuild the disk geometries and PCI interrupts before even the linux
boot floppy worked. 

The BIOS is marked 11/23/94-OPTI-546-822 2A5UMB01-00 (Award) and is a
4.50G, and is not upgradeable, according to my system vendor. The hard
drives sit on a CMD-640 controller on the PCI bus.

thanks for any hints as to how i MIGHT fix this...

Les Schaffer