Re: Need a 486 VESA LB motherboard

Hi Rick !

( inserting comments as I go, be sure to read all the way down. )


Interesting. What kind of controller card were/are you using ?

I/O controller?


Sorry, no, I meant HDD/FD controller. Which you obviously correctly guessed
with your answer below. :-)


That system is using a DTC2278 VLB Hard/floppy/2 serial/1 parallel
controller. I think it's the 2278"s" version of the board - 2 IDE
channels.



Yep, good stuff.


And a Paradise Trio 64 2MB VLB video card.


2 meg! Wow, heavy stuff in it's day. :-)


And a bunch of other ISA stuff...

Everything tests fine - except the motherboard. Completely Dead - no
power, no POST errors - nuttin'. It woulda helped me if the owner had
told me a lot sooner that both floppy drives were producing unexplained
errors - for *weeks* - before I got to it. By the time I got the call -
and it was now locking up on top of the floppy errors - I had a chance
to boot it 3 times before it went dead. The floppy drives tested fine.
She tossed out about 50 floppy disks used for daily backups in the
process... The few disks I could still find that she had marked "bad"
all read ok in another system. On the flaked system it would some times
work, it would some times decide the disk was not formatted, it would
some times not format, it would some times format ok, it would some
times decide the disk had sector errors all over the place.

If you completely lose the timing/clock circuit, the way I understand it
NOTHING works. Can't even boot without that clock providing a "pulse"
for the system, so to speak.


If it were me, I would remove everything except the vid card, install some
known good memory, and see if it will boot then. At least if you see a BIOS
screen, you *may* not have a bad board. ( But it sounds like it. )
Remember, some of these older boards will take a long time to put up a BIOS
screen if they don't see any "stuff" in the slots, like a HDD controller
especially.


I'll see what I got soon, I'm in the BODADC right now. ( BODADC= Basement
of
DOOM and Diet Cola :-)

Does that translate into WICODAC? (Walk In Closet of Doom and Coffee)


Oh, you have one too?¿ :-)


Thanks. It's a minor annoyance: I know the BIOS on the BEK VLB boards is
y2k compliant. The MV035D requires software patching - rolls over to the
year 2049. Changing the date/time on the MV035D requires reinstalling
the y2k software patch. And the BEK has more/better cpu support
(different chipset) - up to direct support for an 80586 processor. You
*have* to use an Evergreen upgrade to pull that off with the MV035D.

But with any of these, the biggest issue is finding the jumper settings
info. At least I have that info for the MV035D and the BEK V429S at
hand. Other boards...? Let me know what you find and I'll see if I can
dig up jumper info. Remember setting up 486 boards? There is no way to
guess at all the permutations for all those jumpers. Both of these have
39 jumpers...



Ever seen this site:

http://www.thegreenhouse.us/th99/

Check out the motherboard settings. I think you will find all the jumper
settings you want. :-)

For example:

http://www.thegreenhouse.us/th99/m/A-B/32659.php



I take it you never banged into a system that used them then. AIRC these
were surplus items on the market after PB "went away" in the US. Don't
think PB made it to Win 95 by then.


Sure did! Most of the later model cases that I have have Win95 stickers on
'em. I have at least one with a Windows 98 sticker.



From what I remember the manual made mention of the PB "Multimedia
Center", which I think was a Win 3.1 software invention by PB when Mr.
Bill made the big splash into multimedia. I think specific dll's were
installed that automatically recognized the remote in the PB version of
Win 3.1 that had the "Multimedia Center" software. Thus, no software
with the remote. At least not my version.


OK.


Can you use a 1MB Paradise Accelerator 24 16 bit ISA video card? I have
a duplicate on that.


No thanks. I'm OK on ISA stuff. It's scary to think of what I have thrown
away.



--
boBWatts®©
EartH
Watts Carburetion Service
Whizzbang Computers
Official collector of: transfat asian plastic junk trinkets !


.

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