First post, by precaud
New member here, I guess this is where folks who maintain and use older systems hang out.
I have a Tyan S1830 based system with 900MHz P3 (dual-boot 98SE and XP) that I have used on my electronics test bench almost daily for a number of years. I need the ISA slots. It has been a solid, reliable board. I recapped the PSU last year as an insurance policy for future operation.
A few weeks ago, I tried booting from several known-good 3.5" floppies for some HDD diagnostics, but it wouldn't boot. I swapped in known good 3.5" FDD and cables, still no joy. If I boot to DOS from the HDD, then "DIR A:", it addresses it, tries to load, but fails with "Data error".
Today, thinking that maybe the onboard FDC had gone bad, I tried disabling the FDC in the BIOS and installed an ISA IDE/FDC card from an old PC. Same results: It addresses and tries to read the FDD, but fails with a "Data error". Tried two other such ISA FDD cards with the same result.
I'm stumped. Any ideas?