sweet!

Today's just been one of those days.

I came back home from work and wanted to play a bit of Homeworld on my Apollo Pro board (GA6VXC74X).
It didn't POST. Great. So I opened it up and checked if maybe something got loose and reseated all of the connectors.

Still didn't POST.

I put it out of the ATX case and on my desk. Reseated the CPU and RAM, cleared the BIOS, put out the battery and removed all of the dust from the board.

Still. Didn't. Post.

The CPU (P3 866MHz) was getting warm, though - so I had a feeling that this was not the problem. In my spare parts box I found an old Celeron 466MHz - I put that in and adjusted all of the jumpers.

CPU getting warm - still no POST. I was beginning to think that my great board had given up just a few days after I bought it, so I put everything back the way it was before - RAM, BIOS battery, original CPU, cooler and FAN and tried to boot up as the very last attempt.

It posted.

I hope that is not happening again or I might have to get my ESR meter and check the caps.

schmatzler wrote:

Today's just been one of those days. […]
Show full quote

Today's just been one of those days.

I came back home from work and wanted to play a bit of Homeworld on my Apollo Pro board (GA6VXC74X).
It didn't POST. Great. So I opened it up and checked if maybe something got loose and reseated all of the connectors.

Still didn't POST.

I put it out of the ATX case and on my desk. Reseated the CPU and RAM, cleared the BIOS, put out the battery and removed all of the dust from the board.

Still. Didn't. Post.

The CPU (P3 866MHz) was getting warm, though - so I had a feeling that this was not the problem. In my spare parts box I found an old Celeron 466MHz - I put that in and adjusted all of the jumpers.

CPU getting warm - still no POST. I was beginning to think that my great board had given up just a few days after I bought it, so I put everything back the way it was before - RAM, BIOS battery, original CPU, cooler and FAN and tried to boot up as the very last attempt.

It posted.

I hope that is not happening again or I might have to get my ESR meter and check the caps.

I had the similar issue, only to find out that one of the SD-RAM slots was acting strange (50/50 chance that it'll POST or not), so I removed the memory, and moved it to another slot, and it still turns on the first try.

Unbricked an OCZ Vertex 30GB today and gave it a little run with HD Tach in Windows 98SE.

I guess that poor SATA1 controller of the Asus P4C800-E Deluxe got maxed out. 🤣

Kamerat wrote:

Unbricked an OCZ Vertex 30GB today and gave it a little run with HD Tach in Windows 98SE.

vertex_hdtach.png

I guess that poor SATA1 controller of the Asus P4C800-E Deluxe got maxed out. 🤣

How did you go about unbricking it? I have a OCZ SSD in a frozen state and cannot get it to respond.

Bancho wrote:

Kamerat wrote:

Unbricked an OCZ Vertex 30GB today and gave it a little run with HD Tach in Windows 98SE.

vertex_hdtach.png

I guess that poor SATA1 controller of the Asus P4C800-E Deluxe got maxed out. 🤣

How did you go about unbricking it? I have a OCZ SSD in a frozen state and cannot get it to respond.

Me too, tell us your secret!

Kamerat wrote:

vertex_hdtach.png

I guess that poor SATA1 controller of the Asus P4C800-E Deluxe got maxed out. 🤣

cpu utilisation of 12 % seems pretty high - no?

Morning.. I'm finally in the process of moving (which is a huge deal for me mentally to finally escape, whole other story I'm sure many gentleman here can relate to 😵 )

Couple ugly snaps of my temporary setup, I realize I've made a few hundred posts here but never managed to get a few shots of all my works in progress. I can take some more part shots when I get organezized 😜

On the right side of the glass desk is the 486 I've FINALLY finished, but I seem to have lost the PS/2 to 5 pin DIN adapter I just bought. I also need to get an IDE extension cable so I can mount in that CF to IDE adapter (using that as a D drive with a regular drive). So now I have to wait til next week for a replacement.. Oh the joys of moving.

That machine has a DX2-66mhz, Vibra 16 CT2260 (which has the drive headers, and genuine yamaha OPL), CL GD5428 and 16MB FPM. The black dell (Studio) was just donated by a friend of mine who kindly drove 10 hours to visit and help me move, Core 2 duo E7500 @ 2.93GHZ. I want to see what the power supply in there can handle and buy a graphics card for it to make my "ultimate XP" machine.. I may or may not upgrade it to a c2q.

You can see the pentium 3 rig I've been working on, still has some issues I'm hoping a replacement board will fix, but it runs games handsomely when it's not crashing 🤣 .

It has an Intel SE440BX-2, Coppermine 800/256/100, 512MB SD-RAM (100mhz)
Sound cards are CT3600 (SB32) with 32mb, Pro II CT1600 (So I use the Pro II for FM synthesis and OPL and the CT3600 for MIDI), there is also a SB Live 5.1 in there (forget model number) that I use when I boot it into XP.. so 3 sound cards 😎.. Also dropped in a faster IDE controller because why not.

Last but not least, if anybody wants to try to steal my favorite books, you'll have to deal with Giant Dog v.2.0™ (jk he's a good boyyyyyy)

vetz wrote:

Bancho wrote:

Kamerat wrote:

Unbricked an OCZ Vertex 30GB today and gave it a little run with HD Tach in Windows 98SE.

vertex_hdtach.png

I guess that poor SATA1 controller of the Asus P4C800-E Deluxe got maxed out. 🤣

How did you go about unbricking it? I have a OCZ SSD in a frozen state and cannot get it to respond.

Me too, tell us your secret!

First I flashed it to firmware 1.10 to unbrick it and then to firmware 1.6. Used an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe with Windows XP SP3 to flash the 1.10 firmware.

Uploaded the guide to flash firmware 1.10 and both the firmwares, no jumpers required for the 1.6 update

I wanted to play some DOS games today, but didn't get any sound out of them with my SoundBlaster Live! Value card.

The DOS emulation driver loads up fine, but it just doesn't work on my Apollo Pro board. It does on an old Socket 7 board, so I guess the newer board is just incompatible and doesn't support SERR# to NMI routing. (Or the latest BIOS breaks it.)

While searching through my pile of hardware and junk, I stumbled across an old ForteMedia FM801-based sound card. It turns out that their DOS drivers work just fine out of the box. I don't even need EMM386 anymore.

This weekend's saved! 😎

(I'm beginning to wonder why Creative were hyped like crazy back in the day. I think at least their PCI Soundblasters are terrible. LiveWare disks install all kind of crap and don't uninstall it completely, DOS emulation is very wonky and there are so many different models that have the same name. Just why?)

I am a sucker when it comes to promotional software/games that are made to drive sales of a product line. One example would be the three Burger King original Xbox games that you could only get at Burger King stores back in the early 2000s. Well, I ran across this sealed copy of "Mott's Presents The Prince And The Prankster The Quest For The Magical Seeds" and had to buy it at a local Goodwill. I scanned in the original paper envelope it came in and then proceeded to carefully open it so I could image the floppy disk and there was a Mott's coupon inside that expired back in 1998. I like the artwork and it really is neat when companies get interactive promotional materials like this developed. Not that it was promoting a product, but the Jingle Disk from the mid 1980s was another nice floppy disk interactive product you could buy at Hallmark stores. Here are the scans of the product and I wrote to Mott's to see if I could release the floppy image here at Vogon's for preservation purposes. I will post the floppy disk image if I get approval from Mott's.

liqmat wrote:

...if I get approval from Mott's.

I will never understand why people even bother to do this.

For obvious legal reasons.

*rolls eyes*

I'm sure Motts (exponential media) has been waiting 20 years to come down on Liqmat COPYING THAT FLOPPY!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI

It's also the rules here at Vogons my friend. Roll your eyes all you want.

Well, I didn't mean HERE, naturally. I got some software that wasn't archived for the PC and I gave it to trixter, I think he has a site for such things.

side note: the tech support number is disconnected. 😜

luckybob wrote:

Well, I didn't mean HERE, naturally. I got some software that wasn't archived for the PC and I gave it to trixter, I think he has a site for such things.

It's cool man.

Attempted to install the L2 cache in my Packard Bell, aaaaaannnnnnd it won't POST. I had the chips in right. WTH?

On the plus side, I'm reinstalling XP Pro with SP3 on a Dell Inspiron 600m notebook and I'm planning on doing the same with the other laptop that had XP Home (with SP3 as well and check the HDD for errors).