Hi, I've got a cheap old IBM 300GL PC, Pentium 1, 166Mz, and when I bought it it I couldn't get it to start up at all at first. It used to hang when after the POST, and did nothing when you pressed F1 to access settings.

Then I found out how to reset the jumper settings on the Bios chip, and at least managed to make it get up to the a: prompt. The thing is, I can only get the a: prompt by resetting the jumper every time. Otherwise, the IBM logo comes on and hangs, as stated above. And, although the CMOS settings say everything's in order as to IDE hard drive/CD-ROM connections, when I try and load any windows/dos software from an a: disk it says "not reading drive C, abort, retry, fail?"

And it doesn't recognise the CD-ROM, which I have replaced with a 32X speed LG model. (Could this be because it's not compatible?)

Sorry about the length of all this but I'm trying to include every detail. I just can't understand why it doesn't boot from the a: drive without always resetting the jumper. How do you tell the CMOS settings to boot from the floppy? I would be eternally grateful to anyone that can help, as I have a useless lump of metal that I'm sure works, but I can't find the key to getting it to do anything!!

Sounds very much like a dead battery so it's forgetting the hard disk parameters each time you reboot or shut down. Fortunately, these are normally very easy to replace and only cost a couple of quid.

If that's not the problem, then it would sound to me like a defective BIOS chip. Your options would then be:
1. spend your entire Sunday trawling the web and trying to find a new BIOS chip (which will probably be in the US if you can find one anywhere);
2. Take a trip to Ebay or QXL.co.uk and get a replacement motherboard.

Let us know how you get on