First post, by TheAdmiralty
- Rank
- Newbie
Evening, everyone!
Got a bit of a monstrosity of hardware here I'm trying to get fired up. I'll give a quick overview of the specs I'm working with:
Motherboard: Young Micro VSF486F/S-3VL; 64K Cache
CPU: Intel 486DX2-66 OverDrive (486DX2ODPR66)
RAM: 8 x 1MB SIMM30
Video: ATI Mach32 VLB 1MB + 1MB Expansion
I/O: StarTech 8-bit Serial/Parallel Controller
Storage: BusLogic BT-445S SCSI VLB FDD/HDD Controller + Seagate Elite-9 ST410800 9GB HDD, NEC CD-301A CD-ROM Drive, Fujitsu FDD
Networking: 3Com Etherlink III, 3Com 56K Dialup/Fax Modem
Sound: Creative AWE32 CT3990 + 32MB
Something is very wrong with it. Since everyone hates having a wall of text, I'll outline my attempts to boot the thing:
- Power on. Memory seek shows 8MB, SCSI controller init, floppy seek, hard drive seek. "HDD Controller Has Failed." Press F1 to continue; all of the IO, cache, and CPU statistics are reported as they should be. Asked to insert bootable disk as expected; don't have my Win95 setup floppies yet, so this is as far as I can go. Aside from my forgetting to terminate the SCSI HDD, which I assume is causing that HDD error, everything seems to be fine.
- Reset system to test again. Video corrupts, everything turns monochrome green. Aside from that, it follows the same process as above and appears to be working.
- Reset. No text is visible, but flashing cursor moves across screen. Speaker indicates memory count completed successfully; once it seems to have finished, pressing F1 should allow it to continue past the failed HDD controller message - text reappears and asked for boot disk.
- Reset. Nothing - no video. Memory seeks test indicated by speaker, completes, stuck at black screen.
- Reset. Nothing - HDD spins up, but system appears to be entirely dead.
- Power down. Remove video card. Reboot. HDD spins up; instead of indicating a video device failure, three short high-pitched beeps are endlessly looped, indicating a base memory failure?
- Power down. Remove ALL expansion cards and RAM. Reboot. No system activity or error beeps.
- Power down. Reinstall video card, RAM. Reboot. Illegible corrupt/artifacted POST text appears, no memory count indicated. Stays in this state.
- Shutdown. Remove all power, power on to drain everything. Jump CPU, VLB cards from 66i to 50i; reinstall all hardware. Reboot. Starts right up, passes all tests identical to first boot.
...and it just degenerates from there. Sometimes clearing the CMOS by cutting all power gets it back up and running, but not always. There is definitely a serious issue with the video card, and I'm going to need a replacement, but removing the defective card should cause it to detect a video error, not cycle a three-beep error tone indicating a base memory failure. I've removed all the hardware except for basically the CPU, and it often fails to respond with any error code at all.
Any thoughts/tips for troubleshooting a near thirty-year-old assortment of hardware? I'd like to get this working as-is rather than continue to throw money and replacement parts at it, but it might just come to that. I'm already on the second hard drive for this system, and they aren't exactly cheap.
He took out his hip flask when he reached the page that described how he reached the page that made him take out his hip flask.