First post, by shoggoth80
Hey all. Dug out my 486. Kind of a time machine. Got my work cut out for me though. When I last had it, it booted up fine, into DOS, and could start Windows 3.11. No issues. It's been stored for some time now though. It has a Crystal ISA sound card in it, I'll have to pull the board number in a bit. I've gotta tear it down anyway. It's not posting at the moment. It powers up, hard drive spools, but never gets to POST, and no hard drive activity light. The guts are mostly clean. Still has the original spec hard drive in it. Cirrus Logic GPU, but for all I know it's still running as-built specs. I never got around to playing with it much, and it's been many years. While powering up, I get a growl like sound. repeatedly. It doesn't sound like it is coming from the drive, almost more like close to the CPU, which doesn't make a lot of sense, as the fan spins up without issue. Maybe power issues, or perhaps a dead CMOS might cause it to not POST?
Other thoughts.... the riser on it is all ISA. I have some PCI goodies that I wouldn't mind adding... is it possible to put a riser, with PCI in the machine, even though (I think) the riser is connected through an ISA slot? I didn't mess with the guts of the machines back in the day, and interfaces seem a bit more distilled down now.