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Pentium III Intel Motherboard, powering on but no video?

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First post, by RubDub2k

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Hi everyone, been awhile since I've posted, but have finally had some time to get back into some computer hobbies!

I got an intel "D815EEA2/D815EPEA2" socket 370 board from a neighbor, it was pretty dirty. I cleaned it up, popped out the old coppermine processor (just some ~800 MHz thing, nothing too crazy), cleaned out all the ports with IPA (they are pretty corroded, which is a bit concerning), new CMOS battery, etc.

After all that, I plugged in an old ATX PSU I had to the board, connected a power button, and to my joy it powered up! LED on the board came on, the CPU fan spun up, the caps/num/scroll lock lights on my keyboard lit up, and then the board made three beeps complaining about the memory. I powered it down, reseated the memory, the beeps went away, and... nothing. The board still powered up, the CPU fan still spun, but that was it. No "POST" beep, no video out from the onboard VGA, just silence.

I then went through like 1.5 hours of troubleshooting (tried a different pentium 3 that I knew was working, inspected the capacitors on the board more closely, measured the input voltage of the PSU with my multimeter, tried a PCI graphics card, tried even messing with the BIOS jumper pins, but nada). I really am just out of ideas, and am very concerned there may be bit rot in the BIOS ROM or something. Given the oxidation on the ports on the back, I suspect the board was not kept in very stable temp/humidity conditions potentially, so I am worried that maybe the board is electrically okay, but that the actual BIOS info is just gone/corrupted.

I hope I am wrong; this is the first motherboard I've had that's displayed these symptoms. Does anyone have any recommendations/suggestions for additional troubleshooting? Does everything I've done point to a pretty obvious issue that boards of this era have? I am not super familiar with pre-pentium 4 boards, I only have one other pentium 3 board that fortunately works just fine.

If you have any thoughts, tips or other info please feel free to let me know! Thanks,

- RubDub

Reply 1 of 3, by red-ray

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I have a Diagnostic Card so I can see exactly what is happening, they don't cost that much and suspect you will find one locally rather than waiting for one from China.

Reply 2 of 3, by DaveDDS

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I see it has a VGA connector - so presumably on-board video.

Your neighbor might have been using off-board video or otherwise has video "set oddly" in BIOS - I'd first remove the coin cell battery, and connect the battery connections on the
mainboard together (while powered off) and leave it for 10 mins or more - basically you want to trash the CMOS config which will make in install defaults.
(There might be a jumper to do this ... check mainboard docs if you have them)

This will have the added advantage of resetting any other "odd" config that might cause problems,

- Dave ; https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ; "Daves Old Computers" ; SW dev addict best known:
ImageDisk: rd/wr ANY floppy PChardware can ; Micro-C: compiler for DOS+ManySmallCPU ; DDLINK: simple/small FileTrans(w/o netSW)via Lan/Lpt/Serial

Reply 3 of 3, by RubDub2k

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Thanks everyone, I actually do have a Diagnostic Card, I just totally forgot I owned it! I bought it like a year ago, and never got around to actually using it haha.

I tried it out, and it was giving me some wonky reporting... after googling some of the symptoms the card was giving me, I ended up finding a suggestion that the DIMM slots might be oxidized, so i ran some deoxit on them, and voilà, it booted!

I think I had thought I had cleaned the DIMM slots subconsciously, but reading that recommendation made me realize I didn't. Board boots to bios, and am good as new! Thanks for the thoughts everyone!

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