I think I fried my mobo.

[mocni]

-IBM 486
I had removed all my drives and cards for use in another computer, and when done with that I put them back in. Now when I boot up the display is all messed up, it is covered in moving horizontal lines. I am slightly able to tell what's going on underneath, but nothing is readable. Is my motherboard fried or could it just be accessive dust near the onboard video, or something like that?

[nathaniel]

a 486?==>trash can. If you have a 486 your chances of sucessfully getting it to work after playing w/ the cards in the box is near impossible because of all of the dust. check your ISA slots for dust w/ a flashlight and maybe get a small vacum hose in there to carefully clean up the dust. I really wouldn't play with a 486 personally not even for linux simply because of the age of the components, if something brakes it will take you of a lot of wasted time concluding that it was a broken part. get your self a nice old 200mhz mmx job-er to play with.

NB

[JALU]

Sounds like your refresh rate is set higher than your monitor can handle. If you bump a 65hz monitor to 85hz you get a lovely scramble effect.

[Lorithar]

*pours a cuppa*

Even the bios screens are scrambled???
This has onboard video?
Had cards and whatnot out of the system ....

If you are getting something on the display at all I doubt your mother board is
cooked.


1) clean the dust and crud out .. Thats a good start,
2) Since you have onboard video, did you remove RAM from the motherboard that was previously installed? Keep in mind that the motherboard based video cards use the motherboard RAM. If this is the case, use the 'clear cmos' pin on the motherboard to put the system into a base state and set your bios up again...

3) make VERY sure that you are using an svga monitor ... the terminal mode scramble actually sounds like your monitor modes aren't set correctly.

4) try removing any unnessesary cards prior to boot, like , netowrk, sound, scsi controllers etc... Its possible that we have an IRQ conflict causing some problems ... 486 motherboards didn't do as well dealing with this as newer boards do.

[mocni]

I have fixed it. It was only dust, so I took the vacuum to it and voila.