First post, by drosse1meyer
- Rank
- Member
Hello All
Working on a new project here, M571 mobo with AMD K6-2, will post some pics and info later on!
The board is in good shape, it would POST but refuse to boot after passing mem check. It would also randomly freeze at Checking NVRAM.
After carefully inspected the board, looking for obvious bad components, checking jumpers, etc. I eventually found a bent leg on the sound chip, shorting to the neighbor. Fixed that and the random freeze went away. Nice! However, the non-boot after successful post was still a problem. Diag card wasn't very helpful.
After calling it a night and sleeping on it, I started the next day by disabling items in the bios. Eventually I hit pay dirt, and found out toggling the External Cache option would let the machine proceed. Win98 install and light use went fine, so everything appears stable in that configuration.
So... There doesn't appear to be anything visibly wrong with the cache chip, again I checked for bent pins, gave them a good alcohol scrub, etc. Tried dropping down the bus speed, changed from SDRAM to EDO, swapped in a plain jane P100, updated the BIOS to latest, but the result is always the same.... external 512 cache will stop the machine from booting.
Does anyone have any other ideas or troubleshoot steps? Could just this be a 'bad' chip?
Thanks!
P1: Packard Bell - 233 MMX, Voodoo1, 64 MB, ALS100+
P2-V2: Dell Dimension - 400 Mhz, Voodoo2, 256 MB
P!!! Custom: 1 Ghz, GeForce2 Pro/64MB, 384 MB