Hi all, new here, so hope its ok to start with a question. I had a look if there was somewhere for introductions, but couldn't find, so here goes.
I picked up a couple of older PC's off of Facebook marketplace back in Jan or Feb, as I simply have a fascination with tinkering with old hardware. There was a slot 1 Celeron that shows no sign of life at all, and one I decided to try and build into a decent little W98SE machine, a super socket 7 Gigabyte GA-5AA, with a 400mhz AMD K6-2.
It seemed like quite a nice board with a good selection of features, AGP, 3x SD ram slots supporting up to 768mb total, AGP, PCI and ISA, and onboard USB.
It was all working fine, got a install of W98SE on it and was in the middle of a reboot installing drivers when it hung during/after post.
Most of the time the post screen comes up, it completes the memory check, seeks the floppy, comes up with "wait" with a flashing cursor, the energy star logo in the top right disappears and that is it, it will sit in this state as long as it is left powered on. This is with 1 stick of ram, I have tried 5 different ones, no change, an AGP graphics card, tried 2 different ones, no change, and just the floppy connected.
If I remove the floppy drive as well, it goes past this screen, and "input not supported" comes up on the monitor, so it is obviously trying to output something, but who knows what.
If I have a floppy and a HDD installed it does much the same thing, but having first detected the HDD correctly
IF I have JUST the HDD installed, it detects it, then moves onwards to another screen, very similar to the post screen, black, with the American Megatrends logo in the top left, GA 5AA underneath that, the rest blank except for a bit of text at the bottom, copyright AMI etc.
These are about the 4 different states I can get it into, it has me totally stumped, almost to the point of giving up with the board.
Other things I have tried have been swapping the K6-2 out for a Pentium 233MMX, a different PSU and leaving the CMOS battery out for a week to ensure the CMOS is completely reset. I have also disabled the onboard IDE controllers, to see if that made a difference, but nothing.
any thoughts before I bin it and start looking for another socket 7 board would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Andrew