Gave a friend a fully working Lucky Star LS-P54CE socket 7 430VX board a while ago, he was helping another guy to repair a CNC engraving machine. Apparently they had some problems configuring the serial ports, so asked my friend to ask the other guy to bring it over and let me have a look at it when I was visiting. Turned out now it was seemingly dead, apparently the other guy had continued on his own...

Opened it up and found two obvious problems:

- The IDE connector for the HDD was installed the wrong way. He had used enough force for the male connector's frame to give way, effectively bypassing the keying.

- A piece of scrap electrical cord with plenty of bare copper lying around on the mobo, potentially - or even probably - shorting things.

Brought the board home with CPU and RAM, installed a known working PCI graphics card, checked all jumpers on the board, which seems to be in order, and did some testing with an old PCI POST card I got at some point but never used before.

When powering on, the POST card's two digit 7 segment display shows these codes in sequence, about 0.5s each, with the exception of the third and second to last, which are very brief:

C.0
C.1
C.6
0.3
0.5
05 (the decimal comma disappears, here it halts)

Replacing the CPU with a known working one makes no difference.

There were 4 pcs 72pin SIMMS installed. I've tried them two and two, in both slot combinations. Makes no difference either.

Removing the TAG RAM and jumpering the board for no cache doesn't make any difference either.

Completely removing the RAM makes the sequence halt at C6 though.

So, at least something seems to be happening. Would also guess it does some kind of RAM initialization, since it halts earlier when removing the RAM.

And here I'm stuck. Never really used a POST card for troubleshooting before, and the info I find about it on the web is kind of ambiguous. Perhaps someone here at least get a hint of what's wrong from the POST codes, or have other ideas what to try next?

Looks like the POST codes are BIOS specific. I'm 99% certain the installed BIOS is the following:

AWARD PCI/PNP 586 (from the BIOS chip label)
BIOS ID: 09/19/97-i430VX-UM8669-2A59GL1CC-00
OEM ID: LuckyStar LS-P54CE i430VX BIOS