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What's wrong with my Socket 7 Motherboard?

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First post, by Hamby

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I have a Socket 7 motherboard with a K6-2 300mhz cpu, 256mb ram, Voodoo 3 2000 video card, Awe32 sound card and (iirc) 3Com ethernet card
The HD is a 4gb divided into 2, 2gb partitions. It also has a CD drive, a 5.25 and a 3.5 floppy drive. This system was working a year or so ago when last I had it on. It's currently running DOS 6.22 with WFW 3.11. Well, it was.

I decided to blow it out with compressed air to make sure there wasn't dust on anything, then replace the HD with a CF to IDE adapter with an 8GB CF card, then install Win98se on the CF card. But first I tried firing it up....

It couldn't recognize the hard drive. No problem, insert Windows 98 install CD into the CD drive... doesn't recognize it, although both the HD and the CD drive are getting power. The bios couldn't find the hard drive.

Dug out a Win98 startup/install 3.5" floppy... made sure the floppy drive was connected (it's recognized in the bios), it has power... nothing. Doesn't even try to access the floppy (although the drive does do the default seek when the system is starting). I tried connecting just the CD drive, still nothing.

However, I connect the CF to IDE to the same IDE cable as the HD... the bios recognized the card as an 8GB drive.

I'm guessing the IDE controller is giving out on the motherboard... but then why wouldn't it recognize the floppy? I suppose it's possible that the floppy, CD and HD all happened to go bad at the same time, but that seems very unlikely.

My next step will be to try to replace the 3.5" floppy with one of a couple others I have sitting around (after I clean and lube them). I was going to just format the CF card on my Win7 PC, but the cheap multicard reader I installed a couple years ago can't mount a CF card.

Should I continue pursuing this, or should I just buy a new Socket 7 motherboard? I considered a super socket 7 as replacement, but they're asking almost $200 on ebay for them... forget that.

Is it even the motherboard? Is there something else I can/should look into?

Reply 3 of 11, by Cyrix200+

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Do you have a different power supply to test with?

Do a visual inspection of the board. How do the caps look?

Remove all cards except the video card. Any difference in the behaviour?

And there is probably more to try. I would be careful to replace the motherboard until further testing.

Did you clean it with compressed air or did you not get around to that yet?

1982 to 2001

Reply 4 of 11, by Hamby

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Cyrix200+ wrote:
Do you have a different power supply to test with? […]
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Do you have a different power supply to test with?

Do a visual inspection of the board. How do the caps look?

Remove all cards except the video card. Any difference in the behaviour?

And there is probably more to try. I would be careful to replace the motherboard until further testing.

Did you clean it with compressed air or did you not get around to that yet?

Didn't occur to me that it could be bad caps. I'll have to give it a look.

First thing I did was blast it out with canned air... a lot.

Reply 5 of 11, by cyclone3d

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Hard drives can and do go bad just from sitting.

My bet is the HDD is bad.

You probably also want to try reseating all the cables and the RAM.

You probably also want to reset the BIOS/CMOS with either the CMOS reset jumper or by leaving the battery out for a while.

If you do want a super socket 7 motherboard.. keeps your eyes out. I haven't paid more than about $30 for one and I think I have all the models I was after and then a few more in addition.

Remember that some people list things incorrectly. If you are just searching for "Super Socket 7", you are doing it wrong.

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Reply 6 of 11, by Hamby

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Cyrix200+ wrote:
Do you have a different power supply to test with? […]
Show full quote

Do you have a different power supply to test with?

Do a visual inspection of the board. How do the caps look?

Remove all cards except the video card. Any difference in the behaviour?

And there is probably more to try. I would be careful to replace the motherboard until further testing.

Did you clean it with compressed air or did you not get around to that yet?

Pulled the Ethernet Card and the Awe32 card, disconnected the CDROM from the ide cable... booted right up.
BIOS correctly identified the drive.
Reconnected the CDROM... DISK BOOT FAILURE.

Reply 7 of 11, by cyclone3d

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Very interesting. What are the jumper settings on the drives set to?

Could also be that one of the jumpers has oxidation and is not getting a good connection.. or a jumper flew of when you were blasting it with air.

Or the CD-ROM drive is dead but I don't remember ever seeing one that died that would cause other drives to not be detected.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 8 of 11, by Hamby

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So I re-installed my Awe32 and my ethernet card... still booted fine.

I connected the CF to IDE to the 2nd plug on the cable, set the CF to IDE to secondary drive, rebooted...
BIOS correctly identified both drives.
Put a floppy in the 3.5" drive... read the disk directory just fine.

Can't believe it's all just a bad CDROM?

Ran FDisk... detected 2gb and 4 gb partition on HD (forgot I'd used a 6gb drive. had the 4gb for backup).
FDisk detected 7.6gb on the CF card... saying it had 504mb. Think that's an anomaly of 6.22

So now I'm going to try another CDROM drive, and if it works, install Win 98 on the machine.

Reply 9 of 11, by Hamby

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cyclone3d wrote:

Very interesting. What are the jumper settings on the drives set to?

Could also be that one of the jumpers has oxidation and is not getting a good connection.. or a jumper flew of when you were blasting it with air.

Or the CD-ROM drive is dead but I don't remember ever seeing one that died that would cause other drives to not be detected.

I'll check the CD-ROM when I pull it out to see what shape the jumpers are in. The drive has power; its light comes on, it pushes the drawer in and out...

Reply 10 of 11, by Baoran

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I would suggest trying different cd drive if possible. I have had a situation before where some ide devices just don't like each other. I would just try to switch between different ide devices until I would be able to troubleshoot exactly what is going on.

Reply 11 of 11, by Hamby

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Okay, now I feel really stupid...

I pulled the drive.. checked the jumper... for some bizarre reason it was set to master... probably at some point I had it on the 2nd IDE controller. Maybe I switched it when I needed the cable for another machine, I dunno...

Changed it to slave... boots fine, reads directory on CD.

The SpeedEasy bios is weird, in that it will let me boot CDROM, C, A, but it won't let me boot CDROM, A, C, or A, CDROM C.

It will let me boot A, C, SCSI, and all combinations thereof. Weird.

Anyway, thanks for your patience and advice. If you hadn't advised me, I'd still be thinking I had a dead HD or dead motherboard.

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