First post, by technokater
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi,
I recently reactivated one of my retro systems and I'm experiencing a weird problem now. The board randomly won't post, like no picture whatsoever, no signs of booting, especially when doing a reboot/warm start (!). Reset doesn't work then and it sometimes needs multiple power cycles to get it working again. Once it is running it seems to be stable, though I get an invalid page fault in kernel32.dll when trying to install the ULi AGP driver. Not sure if that's related but for what I tested so far it seems to be stable.
Here are the specs:
- Gigabyte GA-5AA Rev 3.2
- AMD K6-2 500 MHz
- 2x 64 MB PC100 ECC SDRAM
- Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
- FSP ATX 1.3 PSU
- Windows 98 SE
What I have tried so far:
- Remove everything I don't need
- Clean and reseat CPU
- Update BIOS to F6
- BIOS factory reset
- Other GPU
- Other ATX PSU
- Update Voodoo 3 BIOS to 2.15.12 (was 1.00.1 before)
Caps are looking good, I don't see any bulging or leakage. It doesn't seem to be a heat-related issue, since I can reproduce it with a cold system too.
Any ideas what might be going on? Could it be a dying BIOS EEPROM chip? On cold start it is quite rare but on reboot I would say it happens 7/10 times now. Unfortunately I don't have a PC speaker so I don't know if it has a beep code when it fails to post. I noticed that it sometimes says "Checking NVRAM Update OK" on boot even though I didn't change anything.
Edit: I solved this by turning off ECC in the BIOS. Turns out that ECC is only supported up to 83 MHz and not 100 MHz.