What's the common Link?

[sturpe]

I borrowed a sound card from an old 486 and when I put it back, the A drive and monitor would not work. The A drive shows no activity and I get no display on the monitor.

When I power the computer on, the hard drive's led and the CDROM's led both illuminate momentarily as they should. The A drive LED does not illuminate.

During power on, I can hear a click (like the sound of a relay closing) in the A drive.

The CPU and the case cooling fans both work. I checked the 12 and 5 volt supplies to the A drive...Both are OK.

I re-seated all cards and cables, double checked cable polarities and made sure no pins were bent under.

I also swapped monitors and A Drives with another computer to verify it is not a drive and/or monitor problem. The monitor and A drive both work with a different computer.

Does anybody have any idea what the common link to these two problems might be?

[John Prophet]

wow, an old one huh?

those things scare me to death..trying to get them to work.

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hard to see a link unless you somehow damaged something in the process...maybe just the moving of stuff caused something in the old machine to break?

JP

[john_phoenix]

May be the DMA settings in the 486 have changed if you powered up the computer.

Or it may be the sound card is now stuffed

[Peter M]

I guess the computer does not fire up at all. In 99 percent of all cases, "no picture no drive access" isn't about video or drive problems at all, it's the computer that does absolutely nothing and thus never gets to the stage where it'd fire up the VGA card or access the drives.

The brief LED flash on the drives and keyboard is just the hardware reset signal, where it all starts off.

Have you knocked something out of its socket, slot, or cable header? If not, you might have zapped the thing with an electrostatic discharge.

[sechs]

I'd say that you've probably zapped something. Does it post at all?