Need Help!

[YoYoMa]

A friend recently passed on to me an old 486. I have an old 386, and thought I'd take all the goodies from both and put them into 1.

For starters, I put all the RAM I had into the 486. To get to the RAM slots convieniently I had to unplug the IDE cables from the bus card (I'm fairly sure that's what you call the PCI card into which your drives plug into. Am I right?)

After putting the RAM in, I powered it up, forgetting to plug the drives in. The computer went along normally, until it got to the point when it scanned for drives. I got an error message like "no drives" or "cannot find drives."

So, I shut it off, plugged the IDE cables back into the bus card, powered 'er up again, and...

Nothing. Ever since that point everything will turn on correctly, but the monitor will display nothing, just as as if wasn't even connected to the computer. Something (the hard drive?) wil make that standard "d - d - d - d -dddddddddd" noise, but then it stops dead. Nothing.

Anybody have a clue what went wrong? Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks.

[alex666]

Do you get anything on the screen after you turn on your power? Can you get into your bios? If so, that at least will tell you that your monitor and video card are working correctly, given the other sounds you describe.

[mjc]

It is quite possible that you have plugged the drive cable backwards, hard to do on the newer connectors, but rather easy on the older add-in cards.

[YoYoMa]

No, there's nothing on the screen after I turn on the power.

I think I did plug the drive cables in backwards, but when I unplugged them alltogether again, nothing happened. Nothing on the screen at all.

Is it possible I short circuited and fried something by plugging the cables in wrong?

[mjc]

Double check the connections on everything, particularly the RAM and make sure you are not mixing types (EDO/Fastpage ECC/nonECC).