Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

Question

Pentium 1 motherboard doesn't want to boot.

Sep 20, 2015 6:18AM PDT

I have a Compaq Presario 7212 (Or Compaq Presario 7210 ) AT style motherboard with a Pentium 1 that I was installing a secondary harddrive into.
Everything was working until that point, it passed every Norton Utility and Compaq diagnostic test.
This went fine for a few weeks.

The system was running while I was looking at some connectors, I accidentally kicked the harddrive cradle, moving it along its rail slightly and then everything shut down. The power supply was making a weird high pitched noise, as if water was boiling, for a short moment. I'm not smelling anything burning inside the powersupply or on the motherboard.

Now the board no longer wants to boot. The only things that turn on for a moment are the keyboard lights.
The harddrives still do their thing when I turn on the power, the harddrive light from the motherboard even lights up. But the 'power on' light from the motherboard does NOT.
I have re-inserted every powersupply connector. I have put back the original 2 4MB EDO ram simms supplied by compaq. I disconnected the harddrives, floppy drives and tried different configurations. I switched out the Pentium I CPU for an other Pentium I

None of that has worked, what should I try next?

Thanks for reading

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Answer
Re: no boot
Sep 20, 2015 6:48AM PDT

If the motherboard doesn't boot with another powersupply, consider it is broken and it might be time for a better PC.

Kees

- Collapse -
AT powersupply
Sep 20, 2015 6:52AM PDT

I don't have an other AT style powersupply. I don't have a multimetre to test my powersupply and motherboard either, perhaps I should get one if I want to find the cause of my problems.

- Collapse -
Wanting to find the cause without multimeter or spare parts?
Sep 20, 2015 9:58AM PDT

Be honest here. You are wishing hard that folk will guess what it is without spares or DVM.

Yes, it's sad that there was an accident but such old gear is out there in closets and recycle shops. Here we see 99 buck systems that are 2 or more generations newer that work fine. Just last month a starving student got a newish laptop with Windows 7 for 150 bucks. Yes they wanted newer but they had to settle.