First post, by cj_reha
- Rank
- Oldbie
I recently bought a 386 off of eBay without a harddrive but guaranteed to POST. After attempting to test the front keyboard port, it has stopped responding to the keyboard and I'm afraid I may have damaged/shot the keyboard controller on the board. I was able to get into PhoenixBIOS earlier when it reported a CMOS error but now it locks up after the memtest, with just a blinking cursor. I'm able to skip the memtest by pressing keys, it then says "Memory test disabled by keyboard stroke", but I cannot get anywhere else.
It also used to probe for floppy drives shortly before reporting a CMOS error. The first time it probed, it went slowly but the next few times before the problem appeared the drives seemed to grind a lot faster. Now it doesn't probe for them, it just locks up. It's weird..
It's an Asus CACHE386/33 board with the Intel 386DX-33 installed as well as a Cyrix FasMath copro installed. There's 8 MB of RAM on the external cache board.
Does anyone know if I could somehow boot into BIOS? I'd like to make sure I didn't just kill the keyboard controller. I didn't ever hotplug it, but maybe I plugged it in wrong? I don't know...
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