Have a good one for you other guru's

[photolady]

Got a Compaq here with an older Maxtor. Attempt to boot gives the following error message:

Divide by 0
A:\?7

The drive is clicking and whirring and I know that it is dead but was just curious about the above message.

[liam858]

Usually when a program or device reads as divide by 0 it cannot complete the task because it has an interrupt to not allow it, but i'm not sure about the A : \?7 bit, i don't think A:\? is read, only 7 is picked up when it is typed.


Liam

[photolady]

Not sure about the A:\?7 either, I didn't have any disk in the A drive nor did I hit any keys to get that 7 there. Thanks for the info on the other though, Liam.

[liam858]

No problem, quite a weird one that.



Liam

[SuperSparks]

I'd say that is caused by a corrupt BIOS, or maybe a corrupt boot sector. An attempt to divide by zero is an illegal operation in machine code (and in all programming languages), so there is definitely something amiss with the data or instructiuons that are being read during the boot process.

[dougj]

Clarify for me... you're booting from the hard drive, right? If so, can you boot from a floppy, then read the C: drive? As SuperSparks says, Divide by 0 is usually code-related issue...maybe there's enough of a config.sys and/or autoexec.bat on there that'll shed some light.

Another thought...are the drive and the PC from the same era? I remember many moons ago have several sweet little DOS utilities that started throwing Divide by 0 errors when they were run on faster (think 386) machines. If it's an older drive in a "newer" machine, you may be seeing this phenomenon. If so, see if the BIOS supports stepping down to "Compatible" speed.

[photolady]

Drive is inaccessible, can't be read no matter what I did. Could not boot from floppy as even the BIOS didn't recognize this drive as being installed. I tried running PowerMax on it, and that wouldn't recognize it either.

Thanks for the info Nick and Doug. This is a OOPS!! computer so I don't know how or why code-related comes into effect here. And the customer has opted to get a new drive, so the issue of trying to see/fix is not related anymore. I just wanted to know what the error message meant. I had several Dell's I was working on today, sorry for the goof. You all are right, it is an older computer but not as old as 386 era. I think it was a 1999 computer. It has 98 on it.

[SuperSparks]

Right from the very start of the boot process there is code involved, I'd suspect the BIOS before I suspected the drive. But there is firmware on the drive, maybe that got corrupted.

[photolady]

I don't understand how it could be the bios when it is not accessible by any other computer in the shop, including mine.

[Train]

Remember that the BIOS on those older one was on the hdd. Good old Compaq!

And any newer computer when it hits that mess, screames all kinds of errors.
The onboard Bios passes on the the bios on the hdd .

[photolady]

Yeah, Train, I think this one does too. At Compaq's site while I was looking for XP drivers, (what the customer wants installed) I saw ROMpaq in the driver section. I don't honestly think it will run XP, may have to talk him into w2k. The max memory is 512.

[Train]

Well I have seen a upgrade that run real slow on a Compaq 266 with 64MB of ram. Took that darn thing 5 - 6 minutes to boot up. Tell it to go on line and read the complete windows 98 resource book while waiting.

But I will say I have done a clean install to a new hdd with a Windows cd and had it work with out the added bios on the hdd.

So try it that way and see what flies.