ok... got an old system, based on a VX board (QDI Explorer IV). It has support for EDO and SD-RAM, Pentium and Pentium MMX.
I want to get that old box running and have 2x32 MB SD and 2x8 MB EDO RAM, several vid cards, a P120 and a P133. A 13 gig Maxtor and a 4 gig Quantum HDD and atm a Teac CD writer. CMOS Battery battery is nearly empty (a few hours off and the BIOS settings are gone). The system ran together with 2 realtek nics, the 2 SDRAM modules, the P133 and a ET6000 vid card fine for... a few months running Mandrake Linux. On an overclocking attemp it seems that the hdd files screwed up.
This sort of behaviour is typical for the board if you touch the config (never touch a running system, huh?). Like when I replaced the old EDO-RAM with a stick of 64 MB SD-RAM it gave up working at all. Putting back the EDO-RAM and removing the SD-RAM didn't help... at the end removing the CPU, installing a Cyrix CPU and starting helped reactivating the board... after that it worked with the old CPU. 2x32 MB on the board now. Later I burned a K6-166 on the board by a CPU fan which failed. Since then I experienced problems with the IDE-Controller, the RAM etc.
Sometimes it takes a reset to get the system boot up at all.
Using the SD-RAM I start installation of Linux (SuSE and Mandrake and probably Caldera too) and fail with "Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root FS on 08:01 (that varies with each distribution, but the basic is the same). Windows 98 is failing at several points during the beginning of the installation (which cycles through depending on BIOS settings and hardware configuration). WinXP fails to read several files in the DOS-like part of installation or fails when it tries to start Windows (bluescreen).
Using the EDO-RAM I get a bit further on the Linux side, but at one point it still hangs.
It seems that any data it writes on the HDD is corrupt, I need to install on the Quantum because I still want to rescue some data on the Maxtor. It seemed to me that with the Maxtor the board worked better, alltough Linux once worked perfectly with the Quantum HDD.
I can't get a FSB higher or lower than 60 MHz (altough I once ran the board at 75 MHz FSB OCing the K6 over a long time and any FSB once worked). It just beeps around. beeep beeep beeep beeep... all the time.
I don't 100%ly know the correct voltage settings (MMX, non-MMX). But it works at both anyway (altough with the one I believe to be for MMX CPUs the displayed CPU speed is lower during start up but the system seems to act differently and probably better (worked like that a long long time). On the non-MMX setting the speed seems to be correct.
Has anyone a clue what I can do to solve my problems (atm I only need to get anything on the box to read the (probably corrupted) data on the Maxtor HDD... just want to rescue a few files which I hope are left untouched. After that I think about installing the box again, but maybe this time with a higher CPU clock (150 MHz seems to work fine, 180 MHz may be faulty, but I want to test that. 166 MHz doesn't work due to the 66 MHz FSB)?
Thx
I want to get that old box running and have 2x32 MB SD and 2x8 MB EDO RAM, several vid cards, a P120 and a P133. A 13 gig Maxtor and a 4 gig Quantum HDD and atm a Teac CD writer. CMOS Battery battery is nearly empty (a few hours off and the BIOS settings are gone). The system ran together with 2 realtek nics, the 2 SDRAM modules, the P133 and a ET6000 vid card fine for... a few months running Mandrake Linux. On an overclocking attemp it seems that the hdd files screwed up.
This sort of behaviour is typical for the board if you touch the config (never touch a running system, huh?). Like when I replaced the old EDO-RAM with a stick of 64 MB SD-RAM it gave up working at all. Putting back the EDO-RAM and removing the SD-RAM didn't help... at the end removing the CPU, installing a Cyrix CPU and starting helped reactivating the board... after that it worked with the old CPU. 2x32 MB on the board now. Later I burned a K6-166 on the board by a CPU fan which failed. Since then I experienced problems with the IDE-Controller, the RAM etc.
Sometimes it takes a reset to get the system boot up at all.
Using the SD-RAM I start installation of Linux (SuSE and Mandrake and probably Caldera too) and fail with "Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root FS on 08:01 (that varies with each distribution, but the basic is the same). Windows 98 is failing at several points during the beginning of the installation (which cycles through depending on BIOS settings and hardware configuration). WinXP fails to read several files in the DOS-like part of installation or fails when it tries to start Windows (bluescreen).
Using the EDO-RAM I get a bit further on the Linux side, but at one point it still hangs.
It seems that any data it writes on the HDD is corrupt, I need to install on the Quantum because I still want to rescue some data on the Maxtor. It seemed to me that with the Maxtor the board worked better, alltough Linux once worked perfectly with the Quantum HDD.
I can't get a FSB higher or lower than 60 MHz (altough I once ran the board at 75 MHz FSB OCing the K6 over a long time and any FSB once worked). It just beeps around. beeep beeep beeep beeep... all the time.
I don't 100%ly know the correct voltage settings (MMX, non-MMX). But it works at both anyway (altough with the one I believe to be for MMX CPUs the displayed CPU speed is lower during start up but the system seems to act differently and probably better (worked like that a long long time). On the non-MMX setting the speed seems to be correct.
Has anyone a clue what I can do to solve my problems (atm I only need to get anything on the box to read the (probably corrupted) data on the Maxtor HDD... just want to rescue a few files which I hope are left untouched. After that I think about installing the box again, but maybe this time with a higher CPU clock (150 MHz seems to work fine, 180 MHz may be faulty, but I want to test that. 166 MHz doesn't work due to the 66 MHz FSB)?
Thx
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