First post, by facuarmo
Hello everyone, I'm experiencing a couple of issues (again) with the first computer I've ever had. Thing is that I started messing around with it, testing stuff like some spare hardware I had around my house and things like that; I'm kinda proud about my final build. However, the point is that from the very first tries the computer has had issues to cope up with the keyboard controller (i.e.: it would just shut it down or disconnect at random), after disassembling the whole case and reaching the motherboard, I ended up noticing it had corrosion around the area of the battery which didn't seem to have affected the solder joints around but did affect the internals of the keyboard connector (whose pins were messy and corroded). Today, I decided to go ahead and clean it up thoroughly using an old toothbrush which I embed into isopropyl alcohol, as I kept going, I remembered that my CMOS settings weren't being saved, and then also noticed corrosion around some diodes that protect the BIOS from putting the battery backwards, they weren't making any contact at all. As I kept looking around that area, I also found out corrosion around the fuses for the keyboard connector, which I ended up re-soldering as well.
I don't think any of these can cause the issue I'm currently experiencing, but what I had to do to be able to solder everything properly and clean it up, was to remove the RAM sticks; and I'm not entirely sure if they're supposed to have some kind of order or "priority" which I might be getting wrong, but the computer will now just boot up and do 3 (three) short beeps.
Here's a short video so that you can make up an idea:
Lastly, I'd like to provide some background about what kind of system are we talking about:
Motherboard: PC Chips M321
Processor: 80386DX
Graphics: OAK VGA Card
Hard disk: Seagate ST3660A
I/O Card: Acer ISA controller (doesn't seem to have a model label).
Cheers, Facundo Montero.
