Hi everyone... I'm having some trouble with an old P3 board. It's just something I bought from one of the thrift stores here that I try to fix up and sell for a quick benjamin. I'm not sure of the board manufacturer as there is no name. It's a via chipset and obviously older as it's a P3 and an inline cartridge. The thing gives me a BIOS ROM checksum error when it starts. From past experience I've seen this be a number of things including bad hardware, to corrupt bios to the mobo being bad. This one, I removed all unnecessary periphials. Only things hooked up are needed to run the comp. I still get the checksum error so I was hoping that if I could just flash the bios and overright the old one that it would fix the corruption. The bios is an Award Bootblock v 1.0. The thing is it asks me to insert a system disc and continually has the floppy drive going. I made a bootable disc with the flash utility and bin file on it. I even made an autoexec.bat with @ECHO and the flashing command line. Still, when any disc is in it does nothing. Just sits there saying..."reading material from drive a:" Never gets passed that. I thought I may have had the floppy cable upside down as the light is always on, but I resversed it and the light still stays on but now it doesn't read the disc at all, just keeps saying "insert system disc". I've tried 3 different floppys all to no avail, and tried about 4 different floppy discs. I'm not very familiar with a BIOS in it's deep roots, but is there a line somewhere in the bios that handles drive control, such as the floppy? and maybe this line is corrupt? Not allowing it to read? I'm sure this could be a whole host of things, it's most likely a bad mobo but it is a challenge and I'm just wondering if any of you have had similar success/failure when doing something like this.
There is no name or make on the board anywhere. I've unseated it to look and it's absolutely no where. The best I can figure is that the computer was made by a company called Howard Computers, which is based out of Mississippi (where I live). A quick visit to their website showed that after I searched and found the closest model to the one i have, the motherboard manufacturer is listed as "Howard Computers". I've e-mailed them to ask what mobo they use in this paticular computer, but whether or not they'll tell me or even answer me remains to be seen. Best I can see is a white serial number on the board. I may peal that off as it looks like a sticker. They could've covered the name up.
howard computers is just joe blow, they assemble computers just like you & me. check under label also along outside isa slot
yeah, I figured they just covered the name of the mobo up with a sticker to hide that they were using shitty motherboards or something. I will check near the ISA slot, thanks ddp. I also plan to peal that serial number off and check underneath.
Hey, ddp... I contacted howard computers and they're supposedly going to send me the motherboard info soon. The thing is, I'm worried that even if I do get the correct mobo info this isn't going to work. Right now I'm stuck at this point: Comp starts and gives BIOS ROM checksum error. After this message comes up saying "Read Material From Drive A:". Now, with a good floppy drive that I've tested and a good floppy disk that's also been tested, I made a startup disk in Win XP... I put the awdflash utility and the bin file onto the disk. I also read some directions for reflashing a corrupted bios that said to create an autoexec.bat file with the following command lines: @ECHO OFF @[flash utility] [bios.bin] /py Even with all this on the floppy, the computer does nothing but sit at the screen waiting to read information off of the floppy. This is when the floppy cable appears to be connected correctly (the slot on the cable matches the slot on the drive) If you flip it upside down, the computer doesn't just sit at the screen trying to access information, it will stay at that line where it's trying to access the floppy for a second and then say "Insert System Disk and press Enter", which obviously pressing enter does nothing. I'm starting to think this thing is just fried. Even if I do have the correct bios the damn thing never wants to even try to read from the floppy or any floppy for that matter. The strange thing is no matter how the cable is plugged in, the floppy drive light is always on.
