At 12:25 AM 4/16/01 -0700, you wrote:
>Hi, folks, I hope that one of you might have some ideas for me...
>
>I'm installing another jard drive in a customer's computer. The machine is
>a 486, and the only hard disk is roughly 500+ MB. I put in the new disk,
>and hooked everything up, and the machine won't show any video display. I
>suspect that it's also not booting, but I don't know that for sure.
>
>After the first attempt to start the machine, I have not had the second hard
>drive hooked up to the machine.
>
>In this process, I detached the floppy drive cable. I'm fairly sure I've
>put it back the correct way, and I have tried it in all possible
>combinations of positions.
>
>I did not notice (when I initially opened the box) any ribbon cables from
>the CD ROM to the sound card. In the process of trying to get it to show a
>display, I have hooked up one.
>
>What I get when I start it up is either 2 beeps in quick succession, and
>then evenly spaced beeps about .75 to 1.0 secs apart, or just the evenly
>spaced beeps - depending on the way I have the floppy drive ribbon cables
>hooked up. No video display. In the process of swapping things around, I
>noticed that the PCI video card had wiggled part way out of its slot. When
>it was that way, and when I turned the power on, I didn't get the beeps, but
>I didn't get any video, either. When I pushed the card back in, I started
>getting the beeps again at attempted startup, and still no video.
>
>
>If anyone has suggestions, I'd appreciate them. I'm poor right now, and I'd
>really like to get paid for this job... :-)
>
>Marc
Probably not a lot of help: I had that problem a bit more than a year ago
after I had to replace the power supply (only the 25 cent glass fuse was
blown, but the way they have things set up, you have to buy a whole new 25
dollar power supply). When I got the new supply installed and tried
turning the machine on, I heard the fan running, etc., telling me that I
had power, but nothing came up on the display. Fearing that the event that
had blown the fuse had also damaged some other part$, and not wanting to do
any more damage, I took the computer to a friend from Church who does that
kind of thing for a living. He fiddled with it for a few minutes and
determined that some of the connections were not tight enough.
Those "beeps" at startup are the computer's way of trying to tell you that
there is some required hardware that it can't find. One day when I went to
set up the computer I used in the classroom (a 133MHz Pentium at the time,
IIRC), I tried to boot up and got nothing but a series of beeps. It turned
out that someone else had needed more memory and had "borrowed" the memory
cards from that machine while it was sitting in the room where it was
stored while no one was using it. Replacing the memory cards fixed the
problem. The number and pattern of the beeps is supposed to tell you
something about what the specific problem is, but I don't know the code
that well. Maybe someone else here knows of a resource (web page?) where
it can be found.
So it is possible that you simply have a loose connection somewhere. Check
all the cables and boards to make sure they are seated properly. If that
doesn't work, then it is something beyond my limited powers to guess at the
moment.
FWIW, the computer I bought back in late '95 came with a 100MHz 486DX4 and
a 540MB hard drive. I soon added a 1.6GB second drive with no
problems. Several upgrades later, though, the 1.6GB drive was serving as
my C: drive and was full (as were the other drives) and I was limited by
the fact that the original version of Win 95 will not recognize anything
larger than a 2GB drive or drive partition. I tried upgrading to Win 98
and installing an 80GB drive, but, among other things the old BIOS still
wouldn't recognize anywhere near the full capacity of the new drive, so it
ended up being the most cost-effective course of action to get a new
machine. I still haven't installed the big drive or finished copying
everything over, but at least I'm running better than I was with less than
100MB available on C: for the machine to use as a swap file, etc.
>"The kaboom! Where's the kaboom?! There was
>supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!"
>- Marvin Martian
Hopefully the computer you are upgrading will NOT make an earth-shattering
kaboom as its next unexpected noise . . .
-- Ronn! :)
