Hi Everyone,

I just got lucky and have another old piece of history at home. This time it was a full tower computer with everything including the HDD and the VGA, some Trident 512kB. The print on the board is referring to this type: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/powertech-mb453 - it is pity that again, no manual is present 🙁. Anyway, after starting the PC, the PC booted up, of course, bad battery, etc... - although the NiCd battery was old it didn't leak and overall, the appearance of the board is great.

Aynway, after passing the boot screen the system tried to boot up the HDD, MSDOS, however froze, every time. I thought at first that maybe the HDD is bad or the I/O but the same happened with the FDD. Botting from FDD caused the system boot to DOS but after executing just the dir command, it frooze.

Well, I tried to swap the VGA to another one and it botted up. However, the original VGA is working fine in another board - thats suspicious, heh. So, I am trying to figure out why it is happening and why the former, original VGA, is not working anymore within the board.

• I have cleaned the mobo and every chip I could take out, it was not dirty but just in case. No change.
• I have tried different if not all ISA slots, no change and same behaviour.
• I am not sure about one jumper setting, see enclosed, I have no idea how to set up the two jumpers if my CPU is DX2 80 -JP17/16, any idea?

I am basically out of options on what to try. One idea I had was to disable the cache, on the board, or lower it down, but I am not sure if it will have any impact on the VGA.
I am not sure what component could have an impact on the VGA, any idea what to look up?

I could leave the PC as it is but it is bothering me, heh. I would really want to find the root cause since it can mean some other issues I do not see now.

thx for any advice, Tomas