On 25 Feb 99, at 23:33, Jun Qian wrote:

> I'm building a computer, it is a PII-350 on a PC100 M747 BX mobo
> (onboard agp video and sound), with 64Mb pc100 sdram, 40x cdrom and
> 6.4G HDD.  The problem is that after I put everything together and
> tried to load win98 on it, It doesn't boot at all. There is nothing
> appeared on screen, just black screen like there is no computer
> connected. I can see the power supply fan and cpu fan running,
> harddisk light was also on for a while, the floppy light was on
> forever but doesn't read any floppy. I double checked jumper setting,
> cabling, I tried other ram, cpu, mobo, harddisk, power supply and all
> cables, still no luck. I just built a same machine 24hour ago, it was
> perfectly fine. Can anyone finger out what's the problem is? I'm
> running out of ideal.

  Hmmm:

> while, the floppy light was on forever but doesn't read any floppy. I

This is often the symptom of a case where the ribbon cable to the
floppy drive is wrong way around at one end.

  If I recall correctly, other people here have often been able to
simply correct the cable orientation and proceed.  Me, I've killed at
least three 3.5" drives this way, and never got them to work again.

  [On *most* drives, pin 1 of the ribbon cable goes next to the power
connector.  For some reason, on 3.5" drives you cannot rely on this
rule, and must locate the labels indicating pin numbers.]


David G

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