First post, by michaelfrye97
I've gotten myself into a bit of a pickle with my childhood machine. It's a machine we've owned for well over 20 years and I got it running recently to check out old programs, emails, and maybe install some games. (It's very nostalgic to me)
The CD drive didn't work so I bought a new one that worked. I replaced the CMOS battery with a new one. I also tried to use another GPU (ATI) with more memory rather than the Stealth 64 E3 it came with. But the graphics card actually produced worse results than the previous one so I stuck with the old GPU. Things were going smoothly.
I was messing with settings because it's something I like to do. For some reason I went into the device manager and changed one of the registers in the CD-ROM drive to use register 0x05. (Big mistake)
When I normally boot the machine:
- The disk drive starts up
- When the disk drive is fully running the display would come up
- Few seconds later it'll beep once then load into Windows 98.
After making the register change, I reboot the system, the hard drive spins and the display doesn't come up.
A few seconds later One short beep followed by a long beep followed by 2 short beeps.
It's hard to tell if this is one code (because it doesn't exactly match any Phoenix 4 bios codes) or two codes with the last code interrupting the first one.
My guess is possibly a display initialization error or a checksum/parity bit error. (Video provided in the link below)
Then after awhile (around 1 minute 30 seconds) the system beeps 3 times. RAM error Probably?
So I decided to buy new ram (4x 32Mb instead of 4x 16Mb but still Micron) and swapped them out. No difference.
I also bought a POST card so I can at least get some sort of status on what the motherboard's doing.
I've cleared the CMOS with W12. (No difference)
Reversed the boot block select with W10. (Doesn't beep or do anything)
I even messed around with the Cache jumpers. (No difference)
I've tried using a variety of boot disks, Windows 95 Floppy, Windows 98 Disc, Micron Boot Floppy that came with the machine.
I just can't get passed the three beeps and I'm practically going at this blind with the lack of a display. The POST card shows I can get as far as code EE which according to the POST card's manual means "Shadow Boot Block"
I got myself into this issue last year and I made another attempt recently to get things working with the new RAM to no avail. There seems to be very limited information on this kind of computer so any suggestions would be appreciated.
I've been using this for reference https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/micron … 4hi-09-00236-xx
