Won't boot....Impossible!

I have a 100mhz Pentium that I loaded windows 98 on about a month ago, and I gave it to someone I know so they could go online. I went to their house and set it up, although they still had to buy a modem.

Yesterday I brought the computer back to my house to install the modem and I tried booting it up (without the modem), but nothing happened. I opened it up and made sure all the connections were tight, but still nothing. No one had touched this computer since the last time I was over there, and it was running fine when I was there last. After trying numerous times, all of a sudden it made a long beep then a short beep and I saw the CD-ROM light was on.....I thought ok, I wonder what that means.

By that time I had disconnected the floppy cable from the mobo, and the PS connectors from the floppy drive and harddrive. I turned it off and connected the power cables back up but it didn't beep or do anything this time. I thought ok, I'll disconnect EVERYTHING and it has to boot. I disconnected the power cables from all the drives except CD-rom, the IDE cables from all the motherboard, and the only PCI/ISA card is a PCI video card (Diamond S3 Trio64)

I blew out the entire case with a can of air in case there was something grounding the mobo. Still nothing...

One thing though, on AT motherboards, how does the power cable connect? Is the connector with the red and white wires on the right or the left? I have tried both ways, but still nothing.

Please help!

BTW: I checked in Maximum PC and it said that for an Award BIOS a long and short beep meant a videocard problem

The at connector go so the two black sides of the cable are in the middle.

As for your booting problem -- I would reseat the CPU -- it sounds like a classic loose processor especially considering you moved it to another house.

Try that and let us know how its going.

T

all you need is, 1. Hammer, 2. Duct tape. Hit it with the hammer, then fix it with duct tape. since beating stuff always makes it work, then itll work, and duct tape fixes all, you can fix anything that breaks in the process of beating!

I can't believe it.....one of the 4 prongs that connect the power supply to the on/off switch was loose...Thanks for your help anyway Damn AT computers!

link1305 said:

One thing though, on AT motherboards, how does the power cable connect? Is the connector with the red and white wires on the right or the left? I have tried both ways, but still nothing.

Click to expand...

Better watch that in the future. I killed a perfectly good AT board in my early days of working with PCs by hooking the power connection in the wrong way. I ended up upgrading the client to a celeron system from an old p1-166, but I still broke even on the job.