First post, by retro games 100
- Rank
- l33t
The mobo is a UMC chipset-based board, model TK8881 FA20, and can be found here -
http://www.elhvb.com/mboards/adi/tk8881/TK8881man.html
If I plug in a floppy drive to the onboard controller, and then power on the machine, when the operating system is due to boot up, the disk drive makes 3 clunking sounds, then reports -
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS RETURN.
If I plug in a HDD to the onboard IDE controller, the error message is -
Missing operating system.
Also, for the HDD test mentioned above, the BIOS's HDD auto detection mechanism appears to succeed, but when the mobo goes in to it's POST boot-up sequence, it doesn't appear to be able to detect it, which seems a bit odd. For the floppy drive test, I tried 2 working drives, 2 working cables, and 2 working disks. For the HDD test, I tried 1 working drive and 1 working cable.
I wasn't sure where (or if) the Clear CMOS jumper was, so instead I removed the CMOS button battery, and replaced it with a new one. Inside the BIOS setup area, I tried loading both BIOS and SETUP defaults (although I don't really know what either does!) I currently have 1 PCI graphics card plugged in to PCI slot #1, and 1 stick of 4mb RAM plugged in to SIM bank #1.
There seems to be quite a few BIOS options inside this Award Modular v. 4.51PG BIOS, a lot of which I don't understand. I'm sure there's a "magic setting" I need to toggle, to get this to work, but I need your retro nous to help me out, please people! 😀