First post, by Macca70
Hi all
After a little help with a Slot A Athlon system I'm having a few issues with , it's a bit of a description so please bare with me.
Had a friend drop the system off to check it out with the option of buying it , it's a nice little Packard Bell Micro ATX system(no hdd) with an OEM MSI 6191 motherboard and a Slot A Athlon 600 and a Voodoo 3 3000 , 320mb ram etc
Anyway , it booted fine , went in the bios , checked the specs , switched it off , replaced bios battery , set bios up , time etc and no problems so far.
I fitted a hdd that already had 98 on it on the off chance it would boot , the system it was out of had an intel chipset and drivers installed etc(not the ideal situation but it was just to test) , it booted eventually finding the new hardware and rebooting until 98 had found everything , put USB drivers on so I could use a stick , installed vga drvs/DX7 and copied 3dmark 99 and a couple of games , Quake and Ultimate Race.
On trying the games and 3d mark it was pausing and stuttering quite badly and locked up a couple of times so I thought "oh it'll be a driver/conflict issue with all the other drivers having been on there"
So I rebooted with the intention of re-installing windows but it had no display on reboot , switched it off , unplugged and left it a few seconds and hey presto it comes back to 3dfx bios and then freezes there with no actual post, ok now it's getting a bit odd , switched it off again unplugged everything off the board inc cd fdd and hdd , reseated ram and CPU and dedusted and cleared bios , reboot and this time it posts , went to the bios and whilst setting the time it freezes again.🤬
I can now recreate the no display by just booting with no cd fdd hdd attached and letting it say no operating system found then ctrl alt del , reboots fine , do the same again reboots fine , on the 3rd time every single time it will start with no display again until I switch it off unplug it (no switch on psu) and leave it a few seconds and it will boot again.
I'm getting to the point of thinking it's a mobo issue or maybe even a bios issue and wanted your opinions and experience with Slot A systems
About the only thing I haven't done is swap the PSU so far which I can easily do , were these old Slot A's subject to the sensitivity to a good 5v rail like the later T/bird and XP's ?
This is the first time I've had a Slot A so I'm unsure and any help you could suggest would be gratefully received , I'm doubting myself thinking there is something I've missed ?
I've tried different known good ram and a TNT2 in it just to make sure they weren't the issue even though there's no bios beeps when it goes to no display.
I've had quite a few systems and parts off him and he's been nothing but straight up so I know he wouldn't have given it me knowing there was a problem , he sounded just as confused as me when I texted him about it but did say it's not been run for over 6 months.
Anyway , thanks for taking the time to read all my babbling .
Cheers
Lee
Build 1
Win98se
Dell Dimension XPS B866r
1.0ghz PIII
512mb 800mhz Rdram
Asus GF2 Ti 64mb
Build 2
XP System
Lian Li PC65 USB
Athlon 64 x2 4800+
Asus A8N SLI Premium
2gb Corsair XMS 2
Asus 6600GT 256mb