Marc Erickson schreef:
> 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.
If you want to check for proper booting try a startup disk from any other
computer. Also in the dos-mode you then get into you can see what components are
present in your machine and work and which don't. If you don't have plug and
play stuff you also need to install drivers onto your boot drive (not onto your
c-drive) to start-up properly second time around.
> 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.
Memory? Put your video card in another PCI slot? Disconnect other hardware?
Strip the system to it's barest, then try again. Sometimes your IRQ numbers get
in the way of each other and you have to keep swapping hardware stuff around
until all your hardware is happy with the IRQ they got assigned to them.
Especially Matrox video cards (they usually only allow for two possible IRQ
settings) in combination with some soundcards or extra cards like fax/modem and
ethernet cards are real bitches to sort out for IRQ numbers. Oh and Matrox-video
cards ( I think some others as well) and some Symantec software also clash
resulting in a non functioning system. But Symantec has all the news on that.
> If anyone has suggestions, I'd appreciate them. I'm poor right now, and I'd
> really like to get paid for this job... :-)
Looks like this time you really have to work for it then.... ;o)
Good luck.
Sonja
