I don't have tons of experience with the Zida product line, but from my admittedly small sample size, they seem to be prone to failure. Too bad because they're absolutely adorable little boards. This could be entirely my own bad luck though.

But let's not bury it before time of death is called. Unplug everything but the CPU, RAM, and video card. Try to boot. Any luck?

Pull the CMOS battery. If there's a memory-clear jumper (check the manual -- you can still find them online), short it. Otherwise wait ten minutes. Then, normalize the jumpers and put a fresh battery in. Try booting again.

Remove all but one RAM stick. Actually, remove them all and re-seat one of them. Yes no?

If that doesn't change anything, having spare parts will help. Most of all a spare motherboard. Failing that, any of: spare RAM, PSU, video card.

Beeps are important.. what is the pattern and timing of them? Also, you can insert a POST Diagnostic Card to see what it is getting hung up on at boot.

SirNickity wrote on 2020-02-26, 22:06:

I don't have tons of experience with the Zida product line, but from my admittedly small sample size, they seem to be prone to f […]
Show full quote

I don't have tons of experience with the Zida product line, but from my admittedly small sample size, they seem to be prone to failure. Too bad because they're absolutely adorable little boards. This could be entirely my own bad luck though.

But let's not bury it before time of death is called. Unplug everything but the CPU, RAM, and video card. Try to boot. Any luck?

Pull the CMOS battery. If there's a memory-clear jumper (check the manual -- you can still find them online), short it. Otherwise wait ten minutes. Then, normalize the jumpers and put a fresh battery in. Try booting again.

Remove all but one RAM stick. Actually, remove them all and re-seat one of them. Yes no?

If that doesn't change anything, having spare parts will help. Most of all a spare motherboard. Failing that, any of: spare RAM, PSU, video card.

I pulled the battery and waited, and reseated the CPU. I tried both RAM sticks, one each in each slot. At one point, I got the beeping, bit only in the top slot. Now with one or both sticks in place, the beeping is gone, but still no boot/picture. I have a spare video card, but I lack a spare CPU and RAM.

wiretap wrote on 2020-02-26, 22:25:

Beeps are important.. what is the pattern and timing of them? Also, you can insert a POST Diagnostic Card to see what it is getting hung up on at boot.

They were continuous beeps: beep - one second - beep- one second - and so on. Now there are no beeps, and no picture.

Scythifuge wrote on 2020-02-26, 22:33:

wiretap wrote on 2020-02-26, 22:25:

Beeps are important.. what is the pattern and timing of them? Also, you can insert a POST Diagnostic Card to see what it is getting hung up on at boot.

They were continuous beeps: beep - one second - beep- one second - and so on. Now there are no beeps, and no picture.

If yours is running an Award BIOS, that is usually a memory failure beep code.

wiretap wrote on 2020-02-26, 23:34:

Scythifuge wrote on 2020-02-26, 22:33:

wiretap wrote on 2020-02-26, 22:25:

Beeps are important.. what is the pattern and timing of them? Also, you can insert a POST Diagnostic Card to see what it is getting hung up on at boot.

They were continuous beeps: beep - one second - beep- one second - and so on. Now there are no beeps, and no picture.

If yours is running an Award BIOS, that is usually a memory failure beep code.

It is an Award bios. I don't know what could have happened. I may try buying a ram replacement first - since it is the cheapest option, and go from there. I am getting no beeps now, no matter what I do, which is how it started - no beeps - fiddle with it -beeps -fiddle with it - no beeps.

I forgot to mention that I am using an ATX-AT PSU adapter, but there is power, so I don't think that that is the issue. There is no electrical smell or any other apparent issue. I wonder if something could have happened to the bios chip, but I don't have a replacement or a puller.

I may be screwed. There are no cheap options that I can find on ebay, and of course I don't know what all needs replaced or what caused the malfunction, so I probably need to try to get a mobo/ram/cpu combo. I have though about getting a 1st gen Pentium, but this nostalgia box was supposed to be a supped up end-of-run 486 for all of my DOS/Win 3.x needs. I know I could use a Pentium and something like Moslo Deluxe, though it isn't the same, and I may not have a choice if I still want to use my AWE32 and MPU cards. I have a modern PC with a 1080 Ti, but the nostalgia bug hit me hard and I wasn't enjoying it and really was looking forward to using the 486 box and even put everything in a nice HTPC case.

What a depressing bummer. I have a PII Win98 box. I may put the CF cards in that and use molso for now. Someone sold a CH flightsick with pedals and throttle for super cheap on ebay and I ordered that before finding out about my 486 woes. I am going to eventually have to suck it up and use 86box with my main rig and hope that the AWE32 emulation is good, and use usb adapters for the gameport and MT-32 stuff. I wish I had a lot of capitol, because I see people making new but simple cards to replace old things. I would look into producing ISA, PCI, Gameport etc. hardware for people like us. We could use the stuff in tandem with 86box/DOSBox. Maybe even compatible CPUs from the era...

Thank you both for your ideas. I'll keep checking back to see if anyone has any other ideas.

Hi! New here! I just wanted to chime in for future reference. I have the same exact motherboard and stumbled on the exact same problem. As suggested by wiretap, the 1 second beep interval was a memory problem. What solved it was scrubbing the simm contact traces with q tips and alcohol (edit: the simms themselves, not the motherboard). Apparently they were really dirty. Now it works again! Thanks for this thread!

Assuming You don't have EDO ram installed. It only supports FPM.

Some time ago I got 11 (!) NOS zida 4DPS on local flea makert, 6 was completely dead.

I got near all working after reflashing the bios or resoldering southbridge and northbridge.

If you don't have an eeprom flasher you may use your PII board to "update" the eeprom.
Otherwise as already stated - cleaning, reseating/fpm-ram, flashing the BIOS & acquiring a diagnostic card may do the trick.