I reseated the RAM, and the same issue persists: All fans spin up and stay running, including the ones plugged in directly to the mobo. No beep codes, just a blinking power LED and the HD LED lights up and stays on without blinking. So the PC went from rebooting during my floppy format project - to rebooting during the boot sequence - to giving me a 1 long beep every second or so - to no beeps with a blinking LED.
Prior to this, I made a post about how my floppy drives were working one minute and then they weren't working or only reading in DOS (no writes) with the a: drive -but not in Windows, with the b: drive not working at all, to them working after I unplugged everything and plugged them back in differently (changed splitters and rearranged which devices were daisy chained with each other. I had wondered if the floppy controller was beginning to fail.
The PSU, while old, was never used, prior to putting it in this build. I bought a white/beige Antec desktop case for a 486 build (still waiting for the 4DPS Tomato board to come from Russia been a couple of months now,) and the case was in an unopened Antec box (NOS, basically.) I swapped it out because it had an extra floopy-molex connector, meaning I could do away with one of the splitters, as I have 3 devices that require the tiny molex connector.
After I got the floppy drives working, I was able to format 5.25 floppies for hours. I shut it down that night and resumed yesterday, and ran the PC for maybe an hour, when the issue occurred. I am going to try another PSU. If that doesn't work, I am going to assume that the mobo died. I really hope that is not the case, as the P2B is an amazing and famed board. Since I am going to buy different RAM to test, I may just buy a CPU/mobo/RAM combo, as I have been trying to hunt down a slotket that will allow me to put a 1.4GThz Tualatin in this build, to make it the absolute best that it can be. If I order just the RAM and it turns out that the RAM wasn;t the issue, I will then have to lose more time as I go to buy another mobo. If the P2B still works, I think that with the age of these parts and the mental stress of dealing with this, I should have a couple of backup boards on hand.
I intend on setting up an old school computer on an old school desk with accessories and peripherals from the late 80's to 1999, so that I can feeling like I am going back in time as I play the old games, in the way they were meant to be played. I even found a NOS 19" KDS monitor, and the 1st Voodoo 5 I bought wasn'tworking, and the 2nd one does work. Two steps forward, one step back...
So I am going to try different PSU - order combo - test P2B with RAM from combo - remove P2B if it still doesn't work and examine it for bulging caps. I don't know how to recap (not yet - I intend on learning, because of situations like this and because I like learning new skills, and because the V5 seems to need a recapping at some point, from what I have read on here and seen on youtube.)
I honestly think that I don't need to hunt down a bigger PSU. My p3 Gateway with a Voodoo3 and a SB Live! and other components ran on a stock 200W, and the PC will never run all components at the same time.