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General discussion

After POST

Feb 4, 2005 2:34AM PST

I'm playing with older systems from familly members to learn. I have a Tyan Trinity 400 S1854, 500 PIII, and a 3DFX video card. On start up It recognizes the 3DFX video card, Award Modular Bios, the MOBO, the CPU, all the memory installed, Award PnP Bios and then goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner and stays that way. Initially it would not recognize the primary master so I rest the CMOS then it showed the Primary Master Drive

Discussion is locked

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This could be hard to tell
Feb 4, 2005 2:57AM PST

The power on self test (post) checks and configures your hardware. After all this is done, it looks for an operating system in the order set in the BIOS. If it finds one, it hands the process over to the device to continue booting. Now, what your blinking cursor does not tell us is if it ever got to this point. Normally, you would see some sort of boot error such as "no boot device" or "operating system not found". This does not always happen. What I would suggest is that you try to boot from a floppy disk. If the machine starts, the POST has completed to that point. If not, the POST has run into a snag. If this is the case, I would strip all unnecessary hardware and try again. Leave only the video card, RAM, and drives attached. Remove all other add in cards such as sound devices and modems and try again.

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Booting
Feb 4, 2005 3:24AM PST

Booting from floppy won't hurt the info on the hard drive

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Never did and never will
Feb 4, 2005 12:18PM PST

Booting from a floppy is done purposely for lots of reasons and it has no affect on HD data. The reason I suggested it is to see if the POST completes to the point that it hands the rest of the process over to a bootable device. If not, it's hung up in the hardware recognition/configuration portion and the next steps will be to figure out what piece of hardware is causing the halt. If it will boot from an alternative device, chances are good that there is some problem associated with the hard drive.

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One more thought about your problem
Feb 4, 2005 8:22PM PST

I remember working with some older boards (440BX, I believe) that were unhappy with certain hardware changes in that you had load the default (or "fail safe") settings first and redetect the hard drives or they would hang during POST. This might be something to try.

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Bios
Feb 5, 2005 8:30AM PST

Your talking about resetting to default in bios?
Did it, Nothing
Mobo,CPU500(100x5),3sticks memory(all working),1HDD,1CD, and A Drive
Am I missing anything?
Is there anyway to run diagnostics on a mobo?

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ADD
Feb 5, 2005 8:40AM PST

Also I forgot to list 3DFX Video card

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I hate to ask but
Feb 5, 2005 10:36AM PST

did you try to boot from a floppy? Make sure the A: drive is first in the boot path.

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Boot
Feb 5, 2005 2:06PM PST

Yes I did and neither the CD or the A drive spun up

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You said they did not spin up
Feb 5, 2005 10:30PM PST

but did you get an error? Did you see their LEDs light up at all anywere in the process? Did they try but fail? I am afraid that your cursory answers are not providing enough in the way of information to be of any troubleshooting help so I must bow out at this time. I wish you luck.