First post, by athlon-power
- Rank
- Member
Today has been an extremely eventful day involving my main vintage computer build, regarding multiple issues that have cropped up in less than 24 hours. I'll explain them, and the background of them, here, because I am totally out of ideas. I have zero clue as to what could be causing these issues.
The background behind the first problem is as follows:
In a thrift store, I found an unlabeled external DVD+RW/CD+RW drive that was beige, and it was a full 5.25" bay model. I bought it, because I'd been looking for a DVD-ROM drive (at the least) that had a beige front panel. I took it apart, and took out the drive itself, which was a standard 5.25" IDE drive. The drive identifies itself as a Ricoh Company RW5120A. It worked great until today; It read all CDs quite a bit faster than the 48x CD-ROM drive I was using before, and it even read a DVD re-release of Myst perfectly well, so it read CDs and DVDs. Earlier today, I installed InterVideo WinDVD, to see if I could play any DVD movies on it. When reading any of the DVD movies I tried to play, the system would just reboot- not even properly. The screen would go black, and it go through POST and boot again.
I assumed this was a problem with Windows 98. I was wrong. I have re-installed it, and now the problem persists with CDs, as I found to my disdain that it did the same exact thing when trying to pull drivers off of a known working, clean driver CD a few minutes ago. This problem started occurring before the second issue began.
The background behind the second problem is as follows:
I bought a Creative Labs CT5823 TNT2 based 32MB AGP video card from 1999 a few days back. The heatsink was attached to the video chip using thermal glue. Up until today I had left it alone, but I decided that I needed to change out the thermal paste (and, in this case, the heatsink), so I heated it up with some Quake III Arena at ridiculously high settings, turned the PC off, removed the card, and was able to pry it off of the board with a decent snap. I installed a new heatsink that had matching plastic mounting brackets (if you look at the card online, you'll find that it had mounting holes for heatsinks already there, even though it used a small one with thermal glue), and it worked perfectly when booting up. I installed Windows 98 (I had nuked the prior installation because of the DVD issue), and everything worked great until I tried to install the nVidia Detonator 2.08 drivers, and the drivers installed successfully, but then the system locked up when rebooting on the Windows 98 boot screen. Even the reset button didn't do anything- the system only blacked the screen out, but it remained locked up.
Then, it wouldn't POST at all. This same exact issue happened with my Tabor III, so I took out the 128MB PC133 RAM stick I had in it and installed a 256MB RAM stick. The system then beeped as if there was no RAM at all. So then I installed the RAM stick in a different slot, and the system POSTed. I thought I had a dead 128MB RAM stick, but just to be sure, I cleaned the contacts on the 128MB RAM stick and put it in, and it worked- sort of. The system semi-POSTed, but locked up on the BIOS screen with little red dots everywhere. So I go, OK, I must have killed the video card when I changed heatsinks. But After some more fiddling that I can't remember too well right now because I was panicking, it booted up just fine. I ram MEMTest 86, and the 128MB stick was completely okay. I was able to get into Windows 98 from there, and I ran the Quake III benchmark from that Quake III thread on here, and it ran great, and ran a full 3Dmark99MAX benchmark, again, it worked great, with no issues. I then tried to re-install Windows 98 twice, and both times it would lock up while rebooting at various points in setup. I re-changed the thermal paste on the video card, thinking it may have been overheating, and Windows 98 (FE) setup was able to complete just fine.
The system seemed to be doing great (at no point have I seen graphical corruption anywhere again), but when I inserted the audio driver CD for my Cobra AW744L-II, the DVD issue came back with a nasty vengeance.
As a result of all this, I cannot tell if:
- I killed my video card slightly in some way.
- My DVD drive has broken from trying to read a DVD movie, even though it worked with the Myst DVD version just fine before.
- If my motherboard is failing somehow. I checked all of the capacitors today, and they looked just fine, but all of these strange issues coming up at once is making me severely paranoid. I bought the motherboard from eBay for US$40 a couple of months ago- I will not be able to buy one again if it is dead, because the price has skyrocketed to US$150+.
Where am I?
