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My "new" 486 won't boot up

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First post, by retro games 100

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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! 😀

Reply 2 of 2, by retro games 100

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ratfink wrote:
I would check: - floppy drive ribbon cable inserted right way round - floppy drive type set correctly in bios - hard disk geome […]
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I would check:
- floppy drive ribbon cable inserted right way round
- floppy drive type set correctly in bios
- hard disk geometry - ie. heads/cylinders/etc - in bios

I re-ran the floppy boot-up test, with a 3rd cable, but still no joy. (I paid very close attention to the orientation of the cable, and I also ensured that the Drive A setting inside the BIOS was set to the 1.44 meg option.) Thanks for the advice though! 😀

Edit (solved!) I found the Clear CMOS jumper. It is jumper J2 (taken from the diagram in my O.P. weblink) - pins 3 & 4 need to be momentarily shorted, then reset back to pins position 1 & 2. Clearing the CMOS seems to be a very important operation. 😀 2nd edit: sorry, my first "edit solved" wasn't written very clearly: what I meant to say was, clearing the CMOS has fixed the problem of not being able to boot-up with a floppy disk.

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