VOGONS


First post, by Adsolution

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Hi - first off, while I'm very familiar with working/troubleshooting on modern PCs, I've recently gotten into retro stuff, and there's a heap of stuff I have to learn.

I bought a Gateway 2000 P5-75 off of eBay, and the seller's description said that it seemed to work fine. When I turned it on immediately after receiving it, it would rev, but nothing displayed on the screen, and the HDD light was off. I looked inside and found the video card (S3trio32) wasn't in correctly, so I snapped it back into place. I took out the ribbon cables connecting the hard drive and CD drive so I could check to see if anything else was wrong, and not being able to find anything, put them back. When I turned it on, now the HDD light turned on, but it just stayed on from the second I pressed the power button without blinking at all - nothing displayed on the screen still, and that's essentially where I'm stuck now.

Here's a video of it, well, not doing anything when I turn it on. Will the constantly-on lights and lack of certain normal boot things happening give anyone an idea as to what's (not) happening, so I have something to go off of? For note, I can't see any damaged parts. No burst capacitors, nothing bent, it all looks fine (to me).

Here are some pictures of the inside; not sure if they're going to do anyone any good:

PieZASs.png

nmvTKnt.png

Reply 1 of 4, by Bullmecha

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I would start by disconnecting everything except the vid card, reseat the RAM and CPU, and power it up to see if anything happens. If nothing happens try another vid card that you are sure will work. If its still not doing anything maybe the PSU isn't working right or possibly the board has issues. That's what I can suggest after reading your post. Hope it helps.

Just a guy with a bad tinkering habit.
i5 6600k Main Rig
too many to list old school rigs

Reply 2 of 4, by leileilol

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Yeah, always reseat every component before use after it's delivered. Should be common sense. Hope nothing's fried

(also I hope you have cache 😀 )

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long live PCem

Reply 3 of 4, by sirlemonhead

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I have one of these. I thiiiink it started acting odd when the CMOS battery was dying/dead.

I definitely had a problem with booting the machine and I'm fairly sure changing the battery fixed it for me, but maybe I'm misremembering 😀

Try the machine without the cmos battery..

Reply 4 of 4, by sirlemonhead

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Doesn't look like he's coming back..

Because I was wondering, does anyone else have this exact same machine? I was looking to get a copy of the bios on the pci vga card that came with it. I'm in work now so can't check what it is exactly, but I think it's an S3 Trio 64?