Trying to help thy neighbor...

[Guest]

Recently upgraded and all went well. My next door neighbor congratulated me and let it be known that for some time she had been coveting my motherboard. Soon enough, her computer, and what was left of my old one, was dis-assembled and being put back together. It took all night but finally I had it all together. But it didn't work. Spent several hours last night troubleshooting, but without success. Please help, they are suffering.

It posts. Seems to get thru the bios fine. The windows 98 splash screen comes up, but after a time it slows, and never loads.

What have I tried? I booted the hardrive in another computer to try to eliminate it and windows/software issues. Ran it with only one dimm. Underclocked the bus and processor. Pulled all pci cards. Swapped video card and processor and heatsink/fan. BTW floppy not working. It was late and I ran out of ideas.

Should I try some more things? Is it the motherboard? Any advice greatly appreciated.

Specs:
Giant AT case on wheels(from 1990)
Original 230 watt powersupply
350 mHz K62
Tyan 1590S-100 mobo
3 Dimms of different size and manufacturer
S3 Savage4 based video card
15 GB formatted to 8 because of former bios restrictions
Netgear nic
Isa soundblaster card
56k pci modem
100 mb zipdisk
floppy

Thank you all.

Tom Mc

Even a fool, when he remains silent, appears wise.

 

[Ncogneto]

Sounds like you gave Windoze a giant brain fart. Are you using a freshly formatted HDD or are you using one from one of the two systems with an OS already installed? Ultimatly, it is preferable to start affresh, but with a little patience you can get through this. I suggest the following, Bott into safe mode and Remove all the devices, yes all of them. Shut the computer down. Now remove all the cards except the video card and restart. Have your windows disk handy. Once you get through windows finding new hardware and installing all the mobo specific drivers as well as the vid card drivers and all is running well, shut down and install one other card, my choice would be the sound card. Keap repeating this step one at a time until you are done. Time cosuming yes, but if you encounter a problem it is alot easier to pinpoint it.

 

[Guest]

Good call, my friend. Sometimes windows is like a Yorkshire Terrier. It saw a bunch of strangers, got all excited, ran around in circles, then it wet itself.

While waiting for me to come over, she turned her computer on, held the menu key, selected safe mode, and suddenly the computer worked just fine. I'm heading over there now to put the last couple of cards back in. The important thing here is not my humiliation, but rather, the happy ending.

Thanks for the help!


Tom Mc

Even a fool, when he remains silent, appears wise.