First post, by Charlie Wilkes
It is part of an old desktop computer I cobbled together from junk parts, years ago. It has an ISA sound card so it is good for DOS games.
I had it in a closet for years and got it out recently. I discovered the hard drive was failing so I replaced it with a CF card. When I put the cover back on the case and hit the power button, I got a long, steady beep from the Award BIOS - CPU failure. I opened the case again and saw that my IDE cable was not firmly seated. It was pulled up on one side.
I bought a new identical CPU on eBay for $15. The board posted normally, but the IDE socket no longer works. So I moved my CF card (undamaged) to IDE2, where it shares a cable with a CD drive.
I'm back to a functional system, minus one IDE channel. But I am curious: what did I do? How did I manage to kill my CPU and my IDE socket without (to the best of my knowledge) damaging any other components?