First post, by Fläskboi
Finally decided to put the free 486 together, but it won't let me access devices and use it! Here's the situation:
- FDD won't work.
Different drives and cables from known working FDD's have been tested. Boot floppies were scandisked, repaired, thrown away and remade, confirmed working in more than one other PC. Tried all 4 possible cable directions, where the one working behaved differently depending on the diskette: non-system disk resulted in the message "improper boot device", and system disk lead to no message at all (and also, nothing more happening).
- HDD won't work.
Tried different HDD's - a known working Connor 2GB w/ Win98, that the 486 didn't recognize at all, and a Seagate 3.2GB, that it auto-detected and most times (but not always) found in BIOS auto-detect. Installing Win95 on the Seagate using another PC, I swapped it back at first restart prompt, and also after full install. Both times resulted in "invalid system disk, replace the disk and press any key". Pressing Enter resulted in short rattle from the disk, so it was obviously found and waiting. HDD was freshly formatted and fully scanned with no bad sectors, and IDE cable was replaced and redirectioned with no improvement to report (just the message "HDD controller failure" when put in the wrong direction).
The FDD, HDD and some other stuff is connected to a controller card, alongside an ISA riser on the board. Another riser slot has been tested, with no different result. The graphics card attached to the riser appear to work fine.
Together with initial overheating issues, freezes and suspected PSU/grounding problems, I've spent over 10 hours troubleshooting this rig, and taken four computers apart trying to solve this bullsh**. I don't get past this problem... Is the HDD controller toast? Is there a reason the HDD's are too large, even though they're found and formatted as FAT? Are jumpers improperly set, despite not even having IDE jumpers from my understandings? Is the ISA slot bad, although GPU works fine? Board is Elitegroup UC4914-G.
Thanks 😊