ubiq wrote on 2023-10-21, 19:53:

Tried and failed to get this ASUS P/I-P55TP4 to POST. […]
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Tried and failed to get this ASUS P/I-P55TP4 to POST.

Verified voltages with a POST card, tried a couple PSUs anyway. Tried a few different (proven on other systems) CPU/RAM combos. Dumped the BIOS and flashed it with the only version I could find online. Tried it with the dead Dallas RTC in, removed, and with a Necroware replacement. Couldn't find an exact manual online, but the jumpers don't seem too terribly complicated. Resorted to trial and error... finally gave up. This one is beyond my limited abilities. 🫤
IMG_6097.jpeg

It's a little older than things I usually work on, maybe there's something obvious I'm missing?

The board is missing an RTC. That DIL socket under the CPU socket needs populating with a Dallas 1287 or compatible - take a look at the pic in the Retroweb link you yourself posted.

Boards with these things will generally POST with an RTC with dead battery, but won't post at all if the whole RTC is missing.

PD2JK wrote on 2023-10-21, 16:51:

[...] […]
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[...]

Welcome to Vogons. 😀
If you want, you can update your installation with legacyupdate.net
All software libraries will be updated and missing ones will be installed. Maybe it'll run after that.

Possibly, but it would be more educational to do things manually.

That system has a motherboard with SiS5571 or SiS5582 chipset (can't make it out on the chip, and can't see if there are any 168p DIMMs for SDRAM that is only supported by the 5582), and they support DMA, but need specific SIS IDE drivers to do so. Lack of those drivers could cause the errors seen.

I also see what looks like an S3 868 or 968 based VGA card. They need S3 drivers.

Can't make out what the other PCI cards are, but similarly, look up the chips on them and find drivers for your operating system. vogonsdrivers.com is a good place to start.

Started building my 98SE system.

Biostar K8M800 Micro AM2 (which, frankly, seems like a board that's underappreciated in the retro community, although after a few days of using it, I may realize why), a 30GB SATA SSD I had floating around, an FX5900 or 5950, and that's about all that's in the box so far. I'm happy enough it POSTs, I'll probably actually try to set it up in a few days...

AM3 isn't that retro...but I'm straightening some pins on a Phenom II cpu I got off eBay. Previous owner also managed to get thermal grease all over the underside of the cpu...

dionb wrote on 2023-10-21, 21:15:

ubiq wrote on 2023-10-21, 19:53:

Tried and failed to get this ASUS P/I-P55TP4 to POST. […]
Show full quote

Tried and failed to get this ASUS P/I-P55TP4 to POST.

Verified voltages with a POST card, tried a couple PSUs anyway. Tried a few different (proven on other systems) CPU/RAM combos. Dumped the BIOS and flashed it with the only version I could find online. Tried it with the dead Dallas RTC in, removed, and with a Necroware replacement. Couldn't find an exact manual online, but the jumpers don't seem too terribly complicated. Resorted to trial and error... finally gave up. This one is beyond my limited abilities. 🫤
IMG_6097.jpeg

It's a little older than things I usually work on, maybe there's something obvious I'm missing?

The board is missing an RTC. That DIL socket under the CPU socket needs populating with a Dallas 1287 or compatible - take a look at the pic in the Retroweb link you yourself posted.

Boards with these things will generally POST with an RTC with dead battery, but won't post at all if the whole RTC is missing.

Yeah, I removed the Dallas chip and put that socket there. 🥴 It didn't POST with the dead Dallas, nor with just the socket (expected), nor with the replacement Necroware RTC I have. 🫤

And yeah, I paired up my SIMMs when testing, so don't think that's it. 🤷‍♂️

ubiq wrote on 2023-10-21, 22:06:

[...]

Yeah, I removed the Dallas chip and put that socket there. 🥴 It didn't POST with the dead Dallas, nor with just the socket (expected), nor with the replacement Necroware RTC I have. 🫤

And yeah, I paired up my SIMMs when testing, so don't think that's it. 🤷‍♂️

Drat, that would have been easy... if that's not it, I'd check the MOSFET voltage regulator connected to the heatsink. That's the most likely to fail in such a way as not letting anything POST>

ubiq wrote on 2023-10-21, 19:53:

Tried and failed to get this ASUS P/I-P55TP4 to POST. […]
Show full quote

Tried and failed to get this ASUS P/I-P55TP4 to POST.

Verified voltages with a POST card, tried a couple PSUs anyway. Tried a few different (proven on other systems) CPU/RAM combos. Dumped the BIOS and flashed it with the only version I could find online. Tried it with the dead Dallas RTC in, removed, and with a Necroware replacement. Couldn't find an exact manual online, but the jumpers don't seem too terribly complicated. Resorted to trial and error... finally gave up. This one is beyond my limited abilities. 🫤
IMG_6097.jpeg

It's a little older than things I usually work on, maybe there's something obvious I'm missing?

What does the POST card say? Does it actually start the POST process and stops at a certain point? Or does it completely fail to POST at all?

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-21, 22:10:

ubiq wrote on 2023-10-21, 19:53:

Tried and failed to get this ASUS P/I-P55TP4 to POST. […]
Show full quote

Tried and failed to get this ASUS P/I-P55TP4 to POST.

Verified voltages with a POST card, tried a couple PSUs anyway. Tried a few different (proven on other systems) CPU/RAM combos. Dumped the BIOS and flashed it with the only version I could find online. Tried it with the dead Dallas RTC in, removed, and with a Necroware replacement. Couldn't find an exact manual online, but the jumpers don't seem too terribly complicated. Resorted to trial and error... finally gave up. This one is beyond my limited abilities. 🫤
IMG_6097.jpeg

It's a little older than things I usually work on, maybe there's something obvious I'm missing?

What does the POST card say? Does it actually start the POST process and stops at a certain point? Or does it completely fail to POST at all?

Lol, ok stand down. I just hooked it up again to have a look and was treated to a brief moment of excitement:

So, at the very least, I now know one thing that's wrong with this board. 😭

(FWIW, no it was never starting the POST process, just "----" on the POST card)

ubiq wrote on 2023-10-21, 22:23:

Lol, ok stand down. I just hooked it up again to have a look and was treated to a brief moment of excitement: IMG_6099.jpeg […]
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Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-21, 22:10:

ubiq wrote on 2023-10-21, 19:53:

Tried and failed to get this ASUS P/I-P55TP4 to POST. […]
Show full quote

Tried and failed to get this ASUS P/I-P55TP4 to POST.

Verified voltages with a POST card, tried a couple PSUs anyway. Tried a few different (proven on other systems) CPU/RAM combos. Dumped the BIOS and flashed it with the only version I could find online. Tried it with the dead Dallas RTC in, removed, and with a Necroware replacement. Couldn't find an exact manual online, but the jumpers don't seem too terribly complicated. Resorted to trial and error... finally gave up. This one is beyond my limited abilities. 🫤
IMG_6097.jpeg

It's a little older than things I usually work on, maybe there's something obvious I'm missing?

What does the POST card say? Does it actually start the POST process and stops at a certain point? Or does it completely fail to POST at all?

Lol, ok stand down. I just hooked it up again to have a look and was treated to a brief moment of excitement:
IMG_6099.jpeg

So, at the very least, I now know one thing that's wrong with this board. 😭

(FWIW, no it was never starting the POST process, just "----" on the POST card)

Yeah, that tantalum is definitely blown. It might even be shorting the power supply still ...

ubiq wrote on 2023-10-21, 19:53:

Verified voltages with a POST card

Not saying voltage is your problem, but the LEDs on a POST card do not verify voltages. Those LEDs will light up over a large range. Need to check with a meter.

kingcake wrote on 2023-10-21, 23:29:

ubiq wrote on 2023-10-21, 19:53:

Verified voltages with a POST card

Not saying voltage is your problem, but the LEDs on a POST card do not verify voltages. Those LEDs will light up over a large range. Need to check with a meter.

Didn't know that, thank you!

ubiq wrote on 2023-10-21, 23:43:

kingcake wrote on 2023-10-21, 23:29:

ubiq wrote on 2023-10-21, 19:53:

Verified voltages with a POST card

Not saying voltage is your problem, but the LEDs on a POST card do not verify voltages. Those LEDs will light up over a large range. Need to check with a meter.

Didn't know that, thank you!

Hope you matched up the RTC replacement exact. There is a difference between a BQ3287 and 3287A and the Dallas must match exactly. Wonder why the board says BQ but you say it had a Dallas ? Asus generally does not make that mistake,
just an observation...

even with no RTC POST card would display few numbers

Cosmic wrote on 2023-10-05, 05:06:

I installed OpenBSD 5.1 i386 on my 486 DX50 tonight. It has 32MB FPM and a Cirrus Logic VLB card. This is after playing around with a very similar build in 86box for a while, trying to find the newest version of OpenBSD that will boot fine from floppy and detects the CD drive properly and reads the disc properly - 5.1 worked the best in my case. 5.2 still sees the CD drive but can't read the contents, 6.3 boots but the floppy kernel doesn't see the CD drive at all. I've read online that 6.5 should work, and possibly up to 6.7 (19 May 2020) - after which the compiler target for i386 platforms was changed from i486 to i586 to support a newer LLVM version. So no more modern OpenBSD on 486s unfortunately.

Replying to myself as a bit of an update. I upgraded the DX50 (50MHz bus) to a DX2-66 (33MHz bus). Most benches improved slightly which I want to do a full proper post on, but memory and cache speeds went down a bit which makes sense. Next upgrade is to move from the 16-bit ISA IO card to a VLB IO card, as the disk speed (even with a CF card or DOM) is still rather poor compared to contemporary systems.

As for OpenBSD, I confirmed OpenBSD 6.7 will run on this box! This release is just over 3 years old, running on 30 year old hardware. I love it. It's patched as far as it will go and has been running stable for over 24 hours, including running the default 3 AM maintenance scripts OpenBSD comes with. I did disable the library reordering and kernel randomization functions though, as they would take hours or days to complete, and aren't really necessary for such a hobby PC.

I find it so cool I can ssh into a 486 box and play around in the shell. I thought about installing Python or Node, but not sure if it would work, plus it'd probably take forever to install.

1DX2-66# sysctl hw.model; uptime
2hw.model=Intel 486DX2 ("GenuineIntel" 486-class)
311:52AM  up 1 day, 10:36, 1 user, load averages: 0.21, 0.07, 0.02
4
5DX2-66# top -b | head -n 4
6load averages:  0.22,  0.06,  0.02    DX2-66.local 11:58:30
725 processes: 24 idle, 1 on processor  up 1 day, 10:42
8CPU states:  2.6% user,  0.0% nice,  5.2% sys,  0.0% spin,  1.3% intr, 91.0% idle
9Memory: Real: 2740K/16M act/tot Free: 776K Cache: 1624K Swap: 9836K/64M

Discovered one of my Creative SB Live 5.1! cards is partially dead, and not the game pad I had on the game port!

Today I've been testing out my 5.25" floppy drives again and just like the last time I pulled them out, I don't want to see 5.25" floppy drives for another year or two now.

Somehow while imaging disks with IMD, the Samsung SFD-560D floppy drive just broke and won't read disks in anything - IMD just shows ? for track and data read info on both heads so as far as I can tell, the Samsung specific SF9024 chip that runs the floppy drive may have just stopped working right, since that takes in the output signal from the Toshiba TA8512AF chip. On the thermal camera the SF9024 chip shows as cold so I'm pretty sure it's not doing the thing. Don't wanna pull the scope out the diagnose further, it's just gonna go in a box or be a decorative drive now. It still steps the heads and does the seek on boot but just gives general failure trying to read anything.

I was even starting to like these disks using DSKIMAGE to write to disks and test whether my Teac FD-55GFR could read them (since its alignment got messed up by me long ago).
The super old 'new' 5.25" disks were giving me lots of trouble with read errors / bad sectors so I used a big metal clip magnet thing and wiped the disks, formatted them on the Samsung and imaged them with DOS install images, then they'd work okay for reading on the Teac - so I'm at least fairly sure that the Teac drive is aligned now but ARGH, this was my only factory aligned drive!

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-21, 21:23:

Started building my 98SE system.

Biostar K8M800 Micro AM2 (which, frankly, seems like a board that's underappreciated in the retro community, although after a few days of using it, I may realize why), a 30GB SATA SSD I had floating around, an FX5900 or 5950, and that's about all that's in the box so far. I'm happy enough it POSTs, I'll probably actually try to set it up in a few days...

Well, I've given up on this for now... had no luck with 98 SE, though that machine seems to be running XP rather nicely.

Finally might be able to plan out my dedicated "office" area setup again. Spare room is getting cleared out. Will be able to have something like a 6ft by 3ft ish desktop, meaning double 24" Sansuis one end for modern on an i7 box, and a shoebox itx quad. Then the other end for retro 19" CRT annnd a 4 way KVM, PS/2 and 15pin VGA.

So I'll probably swap stuff around periodically, but what all I have that's PS/2 and VGA and somewhat ready to go, which I need to pick 4 of are...
AST Advantage! 386sx25
IBM PC330 DX/2 66 (u.g. dx4?)
Compaq Deskpro 233MMX
Compaq PIII 600 sff
K6-3 build AT or ATX, though "togetherest" is just M571 in a minitower, slap a CPU in it, but need to figure out the PS/2 header.
Compaq Evo D300 P4 1.7, sdram
Kt333 socket A, got an XP 2100 that would drop in, or build a KT400 board with Tbred.
SiS s478 DDR board, 2.8E HT
Maybe a s754 board and A64 3000 via/agp ... it had a prob, I think I know what it is, but if it isn't it won't "go"

So somewhere in there, I want 3 of them to do DOS, at least one with 3.11, 2 or 3 with 98, maybe one with 95 also, and the top end I'd like to do triple boot 98/XP/lightweight linux. Something in the middle will get a V3 or banshee, top end will get ??? IDK, 9600, 4200, 5200, 9250.. won't want it to do hardcore late XP just to 04ish maybe.

Really I'm wondering which of four fastest to go with, then also where to condense the middle, do I need 233mmx with a K6-3+ I can change multi on.

Ultimately I might have a set of "ultra tunable" dial a speed machines in there, BL3 machine with 1,2,3 multipliers and various bus speeds, K6-3+ best sorted board for ditto and top end near 600. XP mobile going down to 300 easy, then maybe an X2 Black which can take over where XP leaves off, but that doesn't seem necessary, unless there's XP speed sensitive stuff I'm not remembering. Anyway, those all take a lot of bench time, just figuring what to fling in there and get it "established" that I will have a stack of retro machines in my half of the office 🤣

I made a stupid move a couple of days ago ... I'm on the lookout for a Pentium III 933 slot-1. They are horribly priced on a well-known auction site - like +100US$. Then my saved search found a Dell motherboard (Precision 420) with one 933 Slot-1, memory, C-RIMMs (I think, or the memory banks were full) for US$25 or best offer .. Cheap as I were, I put in an offer, hoping to get it for $20 - but within no time, it was sold at listed price ... Of course ... So stupid of me ... D'OH!

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-10-23, 09:13:

I made a stupid move a couple of days ago ... I'm on the lookout for a Pentium III 933 slot-1. They are horribly priced on a well-known auction site - like +100US$. Then my saved search found a Dell motherboard (Precision 420) with one 933 Slot-1, memory, C-RIMMs (I think, or the memory banks were full) for US$25 or best offer .. Cheap as I were, I put in an offer, hoping to get it for $20 - but within no time, it was sold at listed price ... Of course ... So stupid of me ... D'OH!

Blimey! I sold a 1 GHz slot 1 for £7 recently. Either I under charged, or the 933 you saw is overpriced (probably a bit of both). I'm hopeless at pricing things to sell 😁