- Aug 17, 2012
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Hey everyone. I am building an old-school Pentium 3 PC for vintage gaming for a customer. I've done these builds before with no issues, but this one is giving me fits. It will be running Win. 98 SE.
I'll try to run down the specifications as best I remember, but it's a PIII 1 GHz, an old Intel desktop board, I think 915 chipset or 845 (probably 845), I forget which. 20 GB (IDE) hard drive and DVD drive, 512 MB PC133 SDRAM (1 stick), regular 3.5" floppy drive. It has a discrete PCI NVIDIA 4000 series graphics card, PCI NIC, and SoundBlaster sound card.
The power supply is a 500 W generic we got from an electronics recycler. All the parts except the case were bought from a recycler, so we don't know their history, but all are pre-2002 I'd guess.
The issue is the floppy drive. After POST, I get a boot disk error for the A: drive, like it can't find the floppy drive. That's normal because we need the boot disk so we can install Windows.
When I hooked it to the MB and PS and booted, it seemed dead. No pre-boot run through, no light, nothing. It POSTs and goes to BIOS, all of the drives are detected (HDD and OD, I'm running them master/slave on the same IDE cable). I checked the BIOS and it's not there. I could feel something inside it move very slightly when the PC was powered on, but nothing more. I went through the BIOS to check if it was configured to boot from the floppy, and it was. I tried another floppy I had and it behaved the same way. The spindle motor did spin for a revolution, but nothing else.
I tried the drive on another PC that was lying around to see if it was alive, and it behaved normally through POST (I didn't boot to Windows on that PC because it had no monitor). I don't think the issue is the cable or the drives. I am thinking it's the power supply. Is it possible that the power supply can run the rest of the system (drives, CPU, motherboard, NIC, sound and graphics card, but not run the floppy drive? I don't have a way to check voltages to the floppy plug.
Anyone have suggestions? Could it be the PS? The electronics place did check it before we bought it and it checked out fine. I didn't get a chance to test it with another PS. I do have one I know works, but I won't see this customer for another 2 weeks so I can't test it until then.
I know it's an ancient machine, and I am fairly well versed in the hardware side, but not the software side.
Thanks!
I'll try to run down the specifications as best I remember, but it's a PIII 1 GHz, an old Intel desktop board, I think 915 chipset or 845 (probably 845), I forget which. 20 GB (IDE) hard drive and DVD drive, 512 MB PC133 SDRAM (1 stick), regular 3.5" floppy drive. It has a discrete PCI NVIDIA 4000 series graphics card, PCI NIC, and SoundBlaster sound card.
The power supply is a 500 W generic we got from an electronics recycler. All the parts except the case were bought from a recycler, so we don't know their history, but all are pre-2002 I'd guess.
The issue is the floppy drive. After POST, I get a boot disk error for the A: drive, like it can't find the floppy drive. That's normal because we need the boot disk so we can install Windows.
When I hooked it to the MB and PS and booted, it seemed dead. No pre-boot run through, no light, nothing. It POSTs and goes to BIOS, all of the drives are detected (HDD and OD, I'm running them master/slave on the same IDE cable). I checked the BIOS and it's not there. I could feel something inside it move very slightly when the PC was powered on, but nothing more. I went through the BIOS to check if it was configured to boot from the floppy, and it was. I tried another floppy I had and it behaved the same way. The spindle motor did spin for a revolution, but nothing else.
I tried the drive on another PC that was lying around to see if it was alive, and it behaved normally through POST (I didn't boot to Windows on that PC because it had no monitor). I don't think the issue is the cable or the drives. I am thinking it's the power supply. Is it possible that the power supply can run the rest of the system (drives, CPU, motherboard, NIC, sound and graphics card, but not run the floppy drive? I don't have a way to check voltages to the floppy plug.
Anyone have suggestions? Could it be the PS? The electronics place did check it before we bought it and it checked out fine. I didn't get a chance to test it with another PS. I do have one I know works, but I won't see this customer for another 2 weeks so I can't test it until then.
I know it's an ancient machine, and I am fairly well versed in the hardware side, but not the software side.
Thanks!
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