First post, by anetanel
I spent last night installing an Asus P3B-F (rev 1.04) with a P2-450 CPU, S3 Virge PCI card and a Diamond Monster 3D II 8Mb.
I used a PS/2 mouse and keyboard. Flashed the latest BIOS, installed Win98 SE on an SD card and all seemed pretty good.
I had some problems installing the Voodoo drivers, but I had to go to sleep 😜
This morning I wanted to continue the installations, but windows popped an error message on startup that it could not find a PS/2 mouse.
I tried another PS/2 mouse, and also a PS/2 to serial adapter (that works with this mouse on an 486) but windows could not detect it.
At this point the keyboard still works, so I went into the BIOS settings to look if there is anything PS/2 related to mess with, but found out that the keyboard would not work in the BIOS menus. It did work outside the BIOS, in windows and DOS (and I was able to press DEL to enter BIOS) but not in the BIOS menus.
After a few more minutes, the keyboard stopped working at all. I can't even press DEL to enter BIOS.
Tried another keyboard, but it does not work as well.
Tried a 2 other USB keyboards, but no go.
Clearing CMOS did not help as well.
I removed all of the cards and devices except the CPU, memory and the S3 card, but nothing changed.
I googled around and found that similar issues were fixed by removing a chip (capacitor?) marked C151 from the board. I had hard time finding it but eventually managed to locate it.. It's really tiny 😀
So, (and sorry for the ramble) any ideas before I power up my soldering iron and give it a go?
What does this capacitor do, and why does it hate me?
I'm not sure if it has anything to do with my issues, but the PSU that I used is a rather new one, that does not have a -5v rail. the motherboard did complain, but I disabled the warning...
I tried using another, older PSU with -5v rail, but my problem remained.