I recently dusted off my old desktop, a 1st gen pentium 4 with equally ancient hardware after reassembling the bloody thing, which was a horrible hassle since my ECS motherboard is driving me insane. for once it will only use the components if they’re installed in a arbitrary and very specific configuration (only boots if RAMs are in the specific slots it wants them to, for example).
eventually I was able to boot into the OS (some fairly old ubuntu or mint derivative, I can’t tell) but now, I can’t boot from anything else: both the CD reader and DVD writer act like they are dead, so I’m acting as if they were (though I’m sure they should work, but I gave up on them). the USB drives do work once the OS is loaded, but I can’t boot from them, but I’m sure they should work, at least they show up in the boot selector, but it does nothing.
so at this point I’m about to attempt using Plop on a floppy to force it to boot from the USB drive, but right now my expectations are pretty low. if this doesn’t work, does anyone have an alternative idea?
after a million attempts I’ve been able to get once a CD to boot, meaning that I might get a new opensuse working there, even if it’s just through netinstall
well, I’m sorry to be here essentially talking to myself, but I can’t edit my previous posts, so here’s the advancements and I’ll leave it here as an archive just in case someone else is having similar issues (as unlikely as that is).
first: disassemble (only partially) the floppy drive to check if everything is working - in my case the internal components were essentially rotten, so there was no salvaging it, hence might as well remove it from the system and forget it exists (or recycle it). otherwise it might be a viable means to use PloP to boot from a USB port.
second: disassemble the CD or DVD drives, they’re much simpler and easier to mount, remove the dust. if the laser head that’s supposed to move across the disk requires too much strength to move carefully apply a little bit of WD-40 (or other) with a cotton swab on the metallic guides and the screw, just enough to lubricate it. then grab another cotton swab and with ethyl alcohol and clean the laser lens. reassemble and mount it (or them) in back into the motherboard - careful with which one is slave or master, it seems the master drive is the one more likely to be able to boot.
third: reset the CMOS, check your motherboard manual, start the computer, go the BIOS setup (it will force you to anyway), set it load CD and disable all other bootable media - insert a slowly burned bootable (10x) CD inside the drive (right now I’m using netinstall from tumbleweed for i586) reboot (ctrl+alt+del) then it should (hopefully and) finally boot from the CD.
You’ve omitted probably the most common suggestion…
Use a pencil eraser to clean the electrical contacts of every exposed electrical pin to ensure a clean connection. Oxidation on these electrical contacts is the most common problem people will encounter although a good vacuuming (or blowing using compressed air) can also be essential on a very old, and unused machine.
Unfortunately CD/DVD players are prone to problems Look at the price of a new drive. Retail for most is under $30.00 for a complex precision device. It does not take much for them to go bad.:’(
yes, IDE CD/DVD drives are rare, though when I was about to give up I found on a local ebay equivalent someone selling a computer in my town that’s almost the same as mine: same processor, motherboard and floppy, CD and DVD drive (the rest (s)he upgraded a lot more than me). so I could for the price of a new DVD SATA drive get quite a few components (assuming they’re working) or use a bit of WD-40 I already had
after the CMOS reset the CDs never fail to boot, though netinstall did give an error and would not install - then I got a CD with PloP and ran a “burned” USB with the full DVD. It would only install in text mode (512 Mb of RAM really can’t handle the graphical installer) and now works pretty well with window maker.
