I have been asked by a friend to build a computer out of spare parts for
his son to use for school work.

I found a 486 40Mhz DLC mini/motherboard (with Maths Copro) - Award
BIOS, 5 x 16bit slots, 1 x 8 bit. I put in 8 x 1mb simms, used an old
Trident video card, plugged in a monitor and keyborad and switched on -
it worked!

Changed the CMOS battery (wasn't holding a charge - but no corrosion).

Next, I added a 1.4mb floppy and a 170mb HD (Conner) using a super IDE
contoller - set the BIOS up (correctly!)  - the machine keeps giving
errors when it looks for the HD, either HD Controller error or HD
diagnostics error. It will only boot up on the floppy drive with an old
DOS 3.1 disk (tried DRDOS 6, DOS 5,6,6.22 etc)

Can anybody suggest how I can fix this? Have I forgotten something? I
should stress that all the components have been tested on other
motherboards - all worked well.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance

Andy Smith

No sig. file - how sad!