Pretty much the same as any other troubleshoot, unplug everything from the board apart from CPU, video and one bank of RAM, get that working, and plug stuff in one by one.

Aight, sorry for jumping between the accounts so much. Turns out it was the GPU. It's a GTX 750Ti, which might - weak as it is by today's standards -be too new for the PC in question. But right now I was already able to install Win 10, both the floppies and the CDs are recognized, all I have to do is to assign the HDD partition a letter and I can start installing all sorts of stuff, hopefully drivers to the GPU among them.

Maybe has memory mapping issues where the board was built at a time where they thought that 4GB address space ought to be enough for anyone and expected you to have 2GB in the RAM slots and mapped the video RAM in the 2GB above that.... putting more than 2GB of RAM or a video card with memory taking it past 4GB means it craps the bed. There's a lot of Dells like this curse their black hearts. Sometimes you can get 3GB and a 1GB card working, but most often it's a 2GB barrier or no separate PCIe graphics, 3.5G available and the rest stolen by the onboard. There are some editions of this where it's problems over 8GB or 16GB but most manufacturers smartened up.... within the limits of some deliberate intel chipset crippling.

edit: oh yah there's also the power spec thing where PCIe 1.0 makes less available at the slot, that can trip some cards up that are narrowly avoiding a 6pin or make do with 1 and are near that limit.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-02-28, 18:21:

Maybe has memory mapping issues where the board was built at a time where they thought that 4GB address space ought to be enough for anyone and expected you to have 2GB in the RAM slots and mapped the video RAM in the 2GB above that.... putting more than 2GB of RAM or a video card with memory taking it past 4GB means it craps the bed. There's a lot of Dells like this curse their black hearts. Sometimes you can get 3GB and a 1GB card working, but most often it's a 2GB barrier or no separate PCIe graphics, 3.5G available and the rest stolen by the onboard. There are some editions of this where it's problems over 8GB or 16GB but most manufacturers smartened up.... within the limits of some deliberate intel chipset crippling.

edit: oh yah there's also the power spec thing where PCIe 1.0 makes less available at the slot, that can trip some cards up that are narrowly avoiding a 6pin or make do with 1 and are near that limit.

Ah, that all makes a lot of sense. I overshot it by buying a card that new. Guess I'll just pawn it off and pick up something more appropriate.

I checked out the top 5 compatibility picks for this motherboard according to userbenchmark.com and the highest score on passmark would be gts 450, with a 1323. 750Ti generates around 3800, while the integerated graphics for this mobo spits out 4 (yes, four). And this score for gts 450 is generated at only 1 GB of ram - the next best card has 2 gb and is GT 440 with a score of 771 points. GTS 450 is also the most recent of the cards, having come out in 2012. What's a bit scary is that it has a TDP of 106W , but people report that the card works, so it probably makes use of a 6-pin. Still, maybe even a GTX 400-something could work on this mobo. I suspect the problem was the power after all.

If the criterion is 2gb ram or less and 6pin power, them I might have some more choices. I think in the case of my 750ti power was not a problem, since its TDP is 65W - it probably crapped out because it has 4 GB of memory, like you said. So any option with up to 2 GB should work I think.

ODwilly wrote on 2020-10-17, 03:30:

Well the HD4670 and HD 3850 are super expensive and the only AGP cards with unified shaders and any kind of modern video acceleration. For cases if you want to stick to Beige check out the Antec SX series, and the Cheiftec branding of it.

Now, if using a single floppy drive isnt an issue I had an idea of using a pci usb card with a port on the back, mounting a usb 3.5 inch floppy drive in a 3.5 bay and routing the usb cable through the inside of the case into the back of the pci card. Then you could just hook up a 5.25 drive to the onboard floppy header.

They make floppy -> USB adapter boards for internal use. Some have internal USB 2.0 header connectors. You can always adapt the A connector to a header.

kingcake wrote on 2024-02-29, 04:25:

They make floppy -> USB adapter boards for internal use. Some have internal USB 2.0 header connectors. You can always adapt the A connector to a header.
Screenshot 2024-02-28 222433.png

Do these adapters work both ways ?
USB floppy drive --> motherboard with regular floppy connector.
Retro floppy drive --> USB only motherboard.

bestemor wrote on 2024-02-29, 12:16:

Do these adapters work both ways ? USB floppy drive --> motherboard with regular floppy connector. Retro floppy drive --> USB on […]
Show full quote

kingcake wrote on 2024-02-29, 04:25:

They make floppy -> USB adapter boards for internal use. Some have internal USB 2.0 header connectors. You can always adapt the A connector to a header.
Screenshot 2024-02-28 222433.png

Do these adapters work both ways ?
USB floppy drive --> motherboard with regular floppy connector.
Retro floppy drive --> USB only motherboard.

Nope they don't work in both directions.

Hey guys, a quick update:

I'm almost fully decked out at the front. Only the big MO drive missing, which is like 600 dollars or so, so it'll have to wait until better times. Not to mention getting storage media for it is a bit of a bitch too. Still, almost done!

The newest additions would be the 3,5'' MO drive and the ZIP drive. ZIP750s come only in black, so I painted the front bezel and flap white with plastic spray paint. I know it looks amateurish as all hell (probably should polish it a bit so it's smoother?), but 750s come only in black, so I kinda had to do this. The manufacturer had "bone" as an available color, definitely should have gone with that. I might get all these bezels painted to a uniform color at some professional's workshop someday - or at least this one so I can at least know the work is done properly and the paint won't come off. Still, both the drives work fine. Here's the setup:

The "G" drive is missing, as that'll be the big MO drive. Then again, I should probably reverse it, since the small floppy drive is A and the big one is B, might as well try and maintain some consistency here.

Still, the PC has Windows 10 Pro and all the drives work without a hassle. I've also hooked up a Brother laser printer to this PC (gotta pick up a toner tho), so it's actually usable for some light work & errands apart from the whole storage media gimmick. It might also need some cheap headset for gaming. Oh, and I'm also waiting on a ZIP250 USB from the US to handle 100 MB ZIP disks, then I'll really be fully decked out haha

Still haven't tried this for gaming, but it should be possible with titles up to like 2010 I guess. A GTX460 is literally hundreds of times stronger than the integrated GPU on that motherboard.

Aaand it's completed 😁 Was a bit of a hassle with the big MO drive, turns out the first one I got was just damaged. Picked up one off ebay afterwards, which ended up being 2,5x cheaper too (literally) and now it works nicely, just formatted me a bunch of 9.1 and 5.2 GB disks.

To summarize:
5,25'' floppy: works
3,5'' floppy: works
5,25'' MO on SCSI: works
3,5'' MO: works
250 MB USB ZIP: works
750 MB IDE ZIP: works

And all under Windows 10, didn't even require any significant amount of meddling or driver hunting. Turns out it's not a problem to build such a legacy media hub with a relatively modern user experience, w/ Windows 10, where you can browse the modern net, watch youtube and whatnot. The operation is a tiny bit slow due to the small amount of ram this motherboard supports and it could probably be circumvented by downgrading to Vista or something like that, but it's absolutely bearable and most importantly, makes exchanging data between media a breeze.