Hi Janelle,

>To cut a long story short I ordered a second hand 486 motherboard which
>came with 8 MG of ram a CPU which is a  DX66 and put everything back in
>now the screen is just showing a glowing orange colour. The cmos is
>capable of auto detecting  the hard drive but have not even heard any
>post beeps, nothing so far. I tried another video card for the ega and
>also tried a vesa card which allowed me to connect to my pc but nothing
>has worked. Has anyone got any suggestions?

Just some thoughts:
>Do you have an (unless you know the motherboard supports VESA cards)
ISA VGA video card to try?

>Remove all the extras and have just the motherboard, memory floppy drive,
CPU, and controller card (unless the motherboard has the connections on it)
then install the VGA video card and try booting up to a boot disk.

-If that doesn't work, check the cables (or order some new ones) and make sure
that pin one is lined up correctly. There should be a red stripe, or a stripe of
some kind down one side of the cable.  That will be for pin one on both the
controller card and floppy drive.

- If this works, then try installing the hard drive.

If it doesn't come up, then the hard drive may be bad, or the cable has a
problem if you didn't try a different one.  If the computer sees the hard drive
but needs a boot disk to start with, then you may need to run FDISK, or
you might be able to just format the drive.  Either way, it'll help freshen up
the hard drive.

- If everything comes up and you want to try the EGA card (I wouldn't), give
it a go.

>You may also want to check and make sure you have one screw that is
attaching the motherboard to the computer case, so as to give it a good
ground.

Best of Luck!
Lance Kephart


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