It all started when I returned from a quick trip to PC Club, a well-stocked computer shop with great prices. I had purchased two 16 MB SIMM strips and one 3.1 GB Western Digital hard drive. I figured the entire installation process should take a mere couple of minutes, but that estimate turned out to be wild optimism—something of which I am rarely accused.
I removed the cover from my machine and substituted the two 16 MB SIMM strips for two of the existing 8 MB SIMM strips. I also configured the two jumpers on the hard drive, as the drive instruction manual suggested, and connected it to the secondary channel of my motherboard's EIDE controller. I then reconnected a number of cables and turned the computer on.
The success of the RAM installation was immediately apparent during the power-on self test (POST). A quick check of the BIOS settings revealed, however, that the 3.1 GB hard drive was being detected as a 2.1 GB hard drive. Setting aside my curiosity for the moment, I quickly configured the settings manually and continued booting the computer. When Windows NT came up without a hitch, I thought I was home free. I launched the disk administrator and it correctly detected a change in the number of drives. Unfortunately, what it found was less than accurate: it had located a brand new 2.1 GB hard drive.
I rebooted and checked the BIOS settings. They were as I had left them; they indicated a 3.1 GB hard drive. At this point I began studying the drive installation manual a bit more thoroughly. In so doing, I came across an entire chapter devoted to special considerations for hard drives larger than 2.1 GB. This chapter stated that one must use the included EZ-Drive utility to use the entire capacity of such a large drive.
While this too seemed a bit odd to me (I thought these kind of little hacks went the way of the Dodo bird when using Windows NT), I gave it a shot. I installed the utility and let it configure my drive for me. When Windows NT finished restarting, I checked with disk administrator and received good news and bad news. The good news was that the entire 3.1 GB was now available; the bad news was that it was available as two separate and unalterable FAT partitions of 2.1 GB and 1 GB respectively. I found this solution less than desirable, however, as I wanted to use the entire volume as one large NTFS partition.
After spending about half an hour trying to get the drive configured as one large volume, I finally called the technical support number included with the drive. The company's telephone system stated that they were "experiencing unusually high call volumes" and left me on hold (on my dime) for nearly fifteen minutes. While on hold, it occurred to me that it seemed strange to have to set any jumpers at all on the hard drive—it was, after all, the only drive on the secondary EIDE channel.
While I was in the middle of removing the two jumpers, a technician finally answered my call. He listened to my story and confirmed my suspicion: I didn't need to set any jumpers. In fact, by so doing, I had told the drive to lie to the BIOS; i.e., I had instructed the drive to report itself as a 2.1 GB drive. The technician explained that this was quite a necessary feature as certain older BIOS versions would hang during startup if they auto-detected a drive with more than 4096 cylinders. Foreshadowing: sign of quality films and literature everywhere.
Thus, I finished removing the jumpers on the hard drive, reconnected it, and restarted the machine. In accordance with Murphy's law, my machine showed itself to have one of the aforementioned older BIOS versions. It locked up rather nicely on startup. The technician said I had two options: I could obtain a newer BIOS from my system vendor, or I could use the screwy little utility that came with the drive and accept its partitioning decisions.
By this point, my German ancestry had been awakened. I was not going to settle with anything less than a crushing defeat of the little gremlin that was preventing me from using this drive in the manner of my choosing. I logged onto the Gateway 2000 web site and discovered that my BIOS was out of date by more than a year. My machine shipped with version three of the BIOS, and version ten had been released within the last couple of months.
So, accompanied by visions of Steve Hoek (a friend whose system was always so far beyond up-to-date that I suspect him of running software and drivers newer even than those in use by the engineers in the various companies themselves) doubled up with laughter at my plight, I downloaded the update and copied it to a floppy disk as the readme file instructed. I then rebooted my system using the floppy disk and was greeted with the BIOS update program. In a moment of truly serendipitous paranoia, I used the update program to save a copy of my current BIOS to disk before updating the BIOS with the new version and rebooting the system.
When the computer rebooted, the BIOS found no floppy drive, no hard drives, no COM ports, and no LPT port. In short, my system reported itself as an inert lump of metal that could do little more than ask me to "insert bootable media". Of course, the reader might reasonably ask where I was to insert it sans hard and floppy drives, and I won't divulge the thoughts that immediately leapt to my mind.
After executing my standard modified stationary panic, which is a few steps beneath a full-bore linear panic, I went into the BIOS setup and was relieved to discover that everything was simply disabled. I assumed that the BIOS update program had perhaps done this to start from a known state; thus, I set the new BIOS options to auto-detect everything and rebooted the system.
When the system restarted, my prior paranoia seemed justified; it found my floppy drive and I/O ports, but it recognized only the 3.1 GB drive on the secondary EIDE channel—the original two drives in the system simply did not seem to exist. As a test, I used the floppy drive to restore the original system BIOS and was gratified to note that all of my hardware still functioned. That moment of serendipitous paranoia had granted me a safety net.
At this point, I decided to call Gateway for technical support. Interestingly enough, they too were "experiencing unusually high call volumes" and kept me on hold for nearly twenty minutes before someone answered. The technician politely asked me a few questions. As soon as I told him I was running Windows NT, however, he not-so-politely passed the buck. Despite the fact that my problem was occurring long before any operating system gets loaded, he told me that company policy prohibited him from answering any questions for a user running Windows NT. In attempting to transfer me to the Windows NT support representative, my call was disconnected.
After a few moments of violent hallucinations involving Bill Gates and an assortment of farm implements, I again called Gateway and did the twenty-minute wait for a second time. This time I carefully neglected to mention that I was running Windows NT in the hopes of actually describing my problem. After listening to my description of the situation, the technician told me that BIOS updates were an unsupported tool provided to Gateway customers only as a convenience. He said that I should not have updated my BIOS without explicit instructions from a Gateway support representative. It didn't seem to matter to him that the BIOS that shipped with my machine was buggy enough to hang the system completely when certain hard drives were connected. He gave me a toll-free technical support number for the BIOS manufacturer and suggested that I take the problem up with them.
When I called the technical support number, I discovered that it was actually a sales number. The sales creature gave me the correct technical support number, and I called that instead. Once again, I was greeted with a remarkably similar message about "experiencing unusually high call volumes," which forced me to consider that I might be the only living person who understands what the word 'unusually' means. Princess Bride fans will understand: "You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
At any rate, after another non-trivial addition to my long-distance bill, I was eventually connected with a technical support representative. After listening to the story thus far, he was more than a bit confused, albeit for reasons different than my own. He was confused because his company manufactures a Phoenix BIOS, not the AMI BIOS that my system was using. He didn't understand how I could have been referred to him and suggested that I call Gateway again.
So, I called Gateway for a third time (yes, they were still "experiencing unusually high call volumes") and finally got connected to a tech support representative named Shawn Long. Now, Shawn was immediately more helpful than the previous two representatives: he openly admitted that this kind of problem was out of his league, but he did agree to help me try to fix it rather than passing the buck to some other unfortunate or irrelevant soul. In order to prevent what is already a long story from becoming ridiculous, I shall gloss over the next ninety minutes of phone conversation by saying merely that we discussed several possibilities and tried a number of different things without any success. Each time I rebooted my machine with the new BIOS in place, a different combination of drives and I/O ports were found.
Eventually, Shawn put me on hold and went to find some documentation for the motherboard that shipped with my system; it was during this time on hold that I had a minor epiphany. The key to the entire problem was this: my original BIOS was not plug and play capable, whereas the new BIOS was. If this seems a bit less than enlightening, allow me to explain further.
With this revelation in hand, I checked the plug and play portion of the new BIOS settings. As I suspected, a mere two or three interrupt request lines (IRQs) were available. I told the BIOS to initialize itself to default settings and auto-detect everything. The next time I started the machine it found my floppy drive, all three hard drives, and all of my I/O ports without a hitch. To further confirm my hypothesis, I quickly switched to the old BIOS and back again; sure enough, the problem had returned.
While I am not intimately unfamiliar with all of the sordid details of plug and play, I suspected nevertheless that updating the BIOS was not initializing whatever section of memory is devoted to storing the plug and play system resource assignments. Thus, when the system was restarted with the new BIOS, most of the available base addresses and IRQs were unavailable due to bogus data. This would explain why only some of the components were usable with each reboot; i.e., the available resources were being handed out on something like a first-come-first-serve basis. By explicitly initializing the BIOS to default values, I was actually clearing the garbage and returning all of the system's resources to the available pool.
When Shawn rejoined me on the telephone, I spent some time explaining the problem to him. He thanked me for providing the solution and commended me as a good teacher. He jokingly suggested that Gateway should have their users call me instead of their technical support line. Thus, the simple process of upgrading my memory and hard drive, so "simple" that it consumed over six hours of my day, ended (finally) on a high note. I drew the following conclusions from this experience. Take them as you will.
05/06/1999