Bad 30 days in tech for kanbeki, the death of the 686

[Kanbeki]

Last night my friends mom handed me her old cyrix, I was pretty confident that I could get it running again, she said that it hadn't been starting up, cleaned out the heatsink a bit, put down some new thermalpaste, it fired up like a charm..get to windows and it locks, so I was like oh must be a harddrive failure, I hooked it up to my own 686 and suprisingly the hdd worked fine..so I thought it must've just been a windows problem, so I plop the hdd back into the cyrix machine and it hums to life as usual..but the cdrom light is lit..and stays lit..I get no video signal..it just sort of hangs there lit up..I think it might be a bios problem but I can't find a make on the mobo or anything that might be the cmos..I don't even know if boards this old have cmos..could someone please tell me if I killed this computer too or is there something I can do to bring it back to life?

 

[Lee]

Last night my friends mom handed me her old cyrix, I was pretty confident that I could get it running again, she said that it hadn't been starting up, cleaned out the heatsink a bit, put down some new thermalpaste, it fired up like a charm..get to windows and it locks, so I was like oh must be a harddrive failure, I hooked it up to my own 686 and suprisingly the hdd worked fine..so I thought it must've just been a windows problem, so I plop the hdd back into the cyrix machine and it hums to life as usual..but the cdrom light is lit..and stays lit..I get no video signal..it just sort of hangs there lit up..I think it might be a bios problem but I can't find a make on the mobo or anything that might be the cmos..I don't even know if boards this old have cmos..could someone please tell me if I killed this computer too or is there something I can do to bring it back to life?

Just get out some insurance or add it to your home contents insurance, stick it away for 3 months then drop it. You know the rest.

 

[Tabula Rasa]

Its either the bios, or the motherboard itself.
Try, dissconnecting everything but the HD, make sure the HD is primary master and try restarting the bios and autodetecting the HD.

If its the motherboard, there's verry little you can do.

 

[Lonman]

Could be the power supply. I had a system that displayed similar problems and it turned out the psu was all messed up. If it's an older system then it's a good bet there's a lot of crud in the psu by now... try cleaning it real well and see if there's any fried diodes and what-not... or just drop in a working psu and see if that's it or not. Good luck.

 

[LeeJend]

If the board is really an old Cyrix that means a P I or P II processor. If it not a P1 or P2 idsregard this response.

The CMOS and Bios are radically different than what we know today. There is a big nicd battery the size of finger joint. If that dies you loose the CMOS contents and have to restart the machine and reload CMOS by hand. That includes telling it what HD, how many cylinders, sectors etc. Also most of the MB setup is done with dip switches or jumpers not in bios. The really old boards also predate plug and play. You need the manual.

There are sites that specialize in identifying old "generic taiwanese MBs" but it's been so long I forget the names.

It's really not worth the effort to work on those boards but upgrading is impossible so you end up building an entire new system (PS, MB, Case, RAM CPU, etc.).

Put the HD into your system again and pull off all data, saved files etc before you mess with it further.