My pc is stuck at this, please help!
Posted by Acceptable-Travel380@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 8 comments
It keeps making beeping sounds, and sounds like if it was trying to load a floppy disc. The floppy drive blinks red and the screen keeps refreshing on every beep.
ellicottvilleny@reddit
Need a tech
Acceptable-Travel380@reddit (OP)
Thank you all for the help, I fixed it
Deksor@reddit
You're welcome, out of curiosity, what was the issue ?
Deksor@reddit
Looks like a graphics card issue to me. Some sort of memory/data corruption
Could be anything between bad vram, bad contact (isa slot, vram sockets) potentially caused by corrosion, bad configuration (jumper settings on the motherboard), corrupted video rom ...
The fact the pc beeps and tries to boot indicates the rest of the machine seems operational, but yeah something's wrong with the display adapter.
First things you can try is to check what the beeps actually mean, go double checks the settings on the motherboard, try to reseat the card. If all of this fails/is properly configured, find another card to double check that the card is the culprit. If it is, then yeah it needs fixing, if the same issue occurs, there's something wrong with your motherboard
Acceptable-Travel380@reddit (OP)
So I gotta open it then?
Deksor@reddit
Yes.
This is a 40 years old machine at this point, the likelihood of it just working without any issues is pretty thin nowadays. You're lucky there's no tantalum cap that blew up or shorted anything (it is easy to fix tho, but impressive when it happens)
There's also the potential issue that the PSU contains what's know as a "rifa" capacitor which may die and release an impressive magic smoke. If your PSU has one, it may not have fired yet but it definitely will eventually, so you should at least check if your PSU has it.
Again it's not a catastrophic failure, but the smell is pretty bad and I think it can be a fire hazard? If it has one you can just cut it off and the PSU will still work fine (iirc it was meant to filter out some interferences the PSU can release on your electrical network, but modern appliances are a lot worse in comparison so it's kinda irrelevant)
Low-Charge-8554@reddit
I have computers that are 40, 30 years old that run without a problem.
Deksor@reddit
That's not what I said. I have many that run without a problem. But they took efforts to get to that point, many things can happen especially with a machine that hasn't been cared for/used for a while. Batteries can leak, capacitors go bad, HDDs and mechanical parts can fail
Some have even chip failures (ram being the most common, or brands known to fail, such as mos chips in the commodore 64)