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CD-ROM and ZIP drives are both ATA33 devices, but your IDE drive is an ATA66/ATA100, this could be something to consider. You could have a bad south bridge, but most likely something else on the IDE controller. A broken trace, a broken ceramic cap or a small resistor. I would do a diode check (red probe on ground) on pins of both of the IDE connectors and compare the readings. If there is a reading that differs a lot between two, then there is most likely a problem there.

Ahh... The memories... The CD-ROM drive has a spindle that holds the disc magnetically. There's usually a rubberized coating on the spindle that gets sticky. That, in combination with a weak belt, prevents the drive pulling the two spindle-parts apart. And that is a weak belt. It doesn't straighten out when removed. Replace! Put in any disc and it will probably open up every time.

I very much miss PCs and hardware from the 1990s through to the end of the 2000s (from 386/486 gen through Intel X58 / LGA1366 - the "Best Years" of PC hardware and good fun times!

I remember having a motherboard that had flaky IDE. It took me a while but I found that there was a 0402 or 0603 resistor array that was on the data lines that had a crack in it. The part looked fine but the ohms reading was off, replaced the array and it worked great after.

OMG. You have Buddha's patience for troubleshooting this project. Fingers are crossed!

This has been fun watching you try and fix the board. I kind of miss those HDD Bays. I had a bunch of them in my old Pentium III 733Mhz PC. Even ran Windows 2000 on it. Loved that OS.

I had that same case 20 years ago!

You’re getting so close! I’m on the edge of my seat! (Excellent series)

That familiar pain when dealing with year 2000 hardware. And Windows ME? My PC was so unstable I was about to change it as I was sure it was the HW. Then a friend recommended I tried Windows XP, I reluctantly tried it and... it was rock stable!!! Grrrr!!!!! I had the very same issue with the CDROM, the belt was slipping on the pulley though so I replaced it. Nice video - HUGE amount of work :) I hope you fix the IDE somehow!

I find myself watching a number of your videos so I've just signed on as a Patreon as well! 😀

Great fun!

I just came into possession of around 30 machines from the same era. Dell Compaq IBM think centre all of them have cap issues. Not every machine but all those brands. The plague is real.

Epic series cannot wait for pt. 3

What a thrill to watch! This setup was way above my „paycheck“ or monthly allowance back in my day as a teenager. Today I just stopped my collection at slot 1 as newest. Can’t wait for an update. Or fix this issue with the primary IDE channel. Or an overclocking 😅

I keep hearing Deskstar as Death Star (given the failure rate, that sounds about right)

I told a friend recently that I watch a lot of youtube videos about older PC hardware and he was like "Why would you do that?" and I was like "Because it's neat" I'm 39 and in 2000 I was still rocking a 100mhz Pentium 1 with 24mb ram as a family computer and a Toshiba Satelite 110CS that barely ran windows 95 as a laptop provided to me for school as accomodation for my Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and its hypermobile fingers and poor penmanship. I didn't have my own personal Rig until 2004 which was a laptop and my first personal Self made Desktop was "Dimitri" Circa 2008.

Happy caps! Love it!

Thanks for the video. I love the build and repairs.

The janky IDE caddy drive contraption is super super period accurate, and I love it.

Win2K Pro was my favorite version as well. This really brings back memories of the old Abit motherboards.

That case is really similar to an Antec I had. I painted mine too! Some of the same plastic mouldings and the internal removable drive bay are the same.

I guess someone already suggested this. but be sure that your hard drive is set to CS (Cable Select) rather than master or slave. Some of those IDE controllers are finicky and will not recognize the devices unless the drive is set to CS.

I repair original Xboxes and Xbox 360 Falcon and Jasper revisions (since RRoD is rare on them). The number one fault with both systems is the optical drive not opening and it is always a worn out belt. Keep in mind a Jasper revision Xbox 360 was made in 2009 and the belt is already slipping. I'd go ahead and replace the belt on that CD ROM drive.

This reminds me of my first PC build with Win2k, an Epox 8kha+ board and Athlon 1900+. Sprayed gunmetal grey with a side window, as was the fashion of the day. As the caps aged, it was like a popcorn machine.

I've fixed MANY CD rom drives by using a fine tipped soldering iron and putting a few tiny dimples on the INSIDE groove of the motor pulley. This adds grip to the pulley. They never failed again. It's a quick and dirty but VERY effective fix that harms nothing. In fact, in some later drives the manufacturers themselves added a texture to the motor pulleys to solve this problem. A new belt only solves the slipping for a short time.

I had a Chieftec Dragon, mine was already green. Nice to see one again, you did a good respray job on that :)

I remember in the 90's when a dual Xeon running Oracle was the server for my _entire_ school. I will also remember how garbage Oracle was to use in CISCO class.

The old belts are a problem in all old drives. It is the belt which has dried and hardened. You would need a new belt.

Totally guessing, but maybe a broken solder joint on a chip, maybe a short or broken connect on a IDE pin. You could DMM the good IDE and compare to the bad IDE.

Wow Never thought i would see that form name mentioned in a youtube video. I haven't been active on it in YEARS

I would say it’s time to source and install a new southbridge chip.

Ah Jack…. He wasn’t turning on😂

Yes! Windows 2000. About bloody time as someone I know might say 😁 The best version of Windows and rock stable compared to Windows Me 🙂👍

Some ideas: - Connect the HDD with a 40 wires not the 80 one, some controllers had compatibility issues with the ATA 66/133 80wire cables. - Maybe if the raid controller is enabled the primary IDE channel doesn't work to prevent conflicts in IRQs and memory addresses... -Try to find the latest BIOS image for this board cause it seems to break or fix devices of the board. -If all the above don't help search for broken traces, reflow the controller VIA chip and primary IDE socket, check for bad resistors, diodes. I don't think this board has some more serious problem than the above. Perhaps the previous BIOS was for a board revision without USB ports. Cheers from Greece, keep up! Jim. P.S the video is not long, your camera forgets easily... Windows 2000 is a proper 32bit system so it fits better on the hardware and perhaps doesn't show RAM issues with GBs of RAM.

You're doing everything, I try to avoid when building a used machine. Using all unkonwn / untested parts is a nightmare and distracts you from finding the important flaws, versus the curve balls all the other parts throw at you. Field strip it, used known good cpu, use known good ram, ram test it. Than from there on. Inspect the first IDE controller package, maybe a promise chip, check the termination resistors near it.

I had a BP6 setup back in the day with Celeron 466MHz CPU's in it.

36:14 After changing the boot drive or moving it to another controller, Win2k will detect the change in the hardware enumeration and ask for a reboot. This is normal, it did not actually install any new devices.

Zip drives with tape holding the front on are standard - the clips always broke on them.

i just happen to be working on a abit kt7a with similar dead usb ports and general instability with random cmos corruption too, i would check the 5V rail at the motherboard input, see if its not too low, and possibly try an older PSU with a higher 5V rail and shorter cabling, this has made my board reliable, it did not work right with a fairly modern 500W seasonic psu, but works ok with a older 20 pin shuttle 200W unit with really short wiring, afaik these older boards run everything from the 5V rail

The BP6 made me swear off single-core systems forever!

I recapped an Abit VH6 and modded the bios. Now it runs everything from P2 233 upto P3S 1400 MHz with 6ms SDRam. The vh6 is a sibbling of the bh6 and the vp6 with the via apollo chipset

Something to check with the IDE channel is looking if any of the pins of the controllers near the ports have come loose off the board. Sometimes the QFP packages' legs break loose over time. It's quite common on graphics cards like the Voodoo2 and results in odd glitches when one is loose like that. Could also be something to check on that other video card for the vram.

The Chenming 601A was our best selling case, hands down. I'd love to see a modernized version make a comeback.

Cant wait for the next part.....this is good! You sounds swedish?

So, the next thing I'd check is resistors and resistor packs. And once more a close look, to see whether some smd components are damaged or have moved. And a close inspection of the legs of chips (loose or bent).

That large cap next to the AGP slot lies just above a voltage regulator or MOSFET... I imagine it'll get rather hot and may "boil" the cap.

A dual P3 VP6 was way out of my budget at the time but it's little brother the dual Celeron BP6 was a game changer. I rode that that machine all the was past the P4 era. The Highpoint controller on those boards were horrible and finicky. I remember tons of issues trying to get them to work with Win 2000 and even Highpoint seemed to throw in the towel and give up on the drivers. After a lot of system problems resulting in occasional HDD corruption I'm pretty sure I just drop to the secondary IDE controllers which weren't Highpoint. I still have my original BP6. One day I want to pull it out and give it a refresher.

Wouldn't be windows me without a routine bsod.

That green color is very attractive. I do think you should not insult the Deskstars though. There was a disastrous generation, as we all know, but before and after, they were generally outstanding, at least until Hitachi put the division up for sale. I think they cut way back on the QC for the non enterprise drives then. Maybe they anticipated WD's style!

Jackcon? Well I guess that's better than the alternative.

I would try running the HDD and DVD on separate IDE channels. More often than not I've had issues running them the way you did (HDD on master and DVD on slave), and especially on ABIT mobos (BE6-II and BP6, in my case.) - installing the DVD and HDD on separate channels fixed the issue.

7:27 that belt is made out of rubber. Alcohol dries it out a bit more, so that’s not going to help. Only for cleaning. :) If anything helps, it’s letting it sit in some hot water. You’ll need to recondition the belt, so it gets hydrated again. Afterwards use some household vinegar and rub it in real good. Afterwards, be sure to clean the belt really well. There’s also wintergreen oil that’s supposed to work. Haven’t tried it yet though. These drives usually have belts that wear out pretty fast when being left unused for a longer period of time.

What's the opposite of Jack-on capacitors? 🤣

I have a suspicion that either something related to the southbridge chipset or the southbridge chipset itself could have an issue. That's where a lot of devices are tied into the motherboard, iirc.

I'd love to see that IDE1 channel fixed! BTW, is the bios set to PNP OS Installed?

Yep, keep that Deskstar hidden from everybody. 😁

Nice, I have a VP6 that needs recapping.

My friend had a simular rig but he and his brotehr for some reason had dual celerons even though their family owned a computer shop.

Those AOpen drives had a buggy firmware the update fixed most of the issues. I blame Win Me for the driver issues it wasn't the most stable OS.... The hard drive detection issue on the VIA IDE controller may be a storage limitation of chipset / BIOS.

I dunno how period correct it is, but I really think you need some green lights behind that front grill. :)

Wonder if the deathstars ever got a firmware revision to fix them / save them..?

Are there any jumpers/switches on the motherboard that control the IDE connectors? Also you could test the IDE2SATA adapter on IDE1.

👍

Believe it or not, the problem is usually the rubber belt.

The IDE thing is probably a bad trace or solder joint. If the other channel is fine, then I don't see why else it would be broken unless it's some weird chip failure.

[insert joke about the cap brand ending in "on" instead of "off" here]

Have you checked the IDE ports for shorts or broken traces? BTW it might be a good idea to dual boot Win98 & 2K since 2K has limited DirectX support. Also while you're at it try comparing the Parallel Port performance between 98 & 2K. Set the port to EPP in the BIOS and it will be much more stable and faster in Win2k than 98, and will allow multiple items to be daisy-chained and used simultaneously without hanging the OS (printer, scanner, Zipdrives).

The problem with stuck drive is most likely cd spindle gets sticky and stuck to the top part of cd clamp.

I killed an IDE port on my PC back in the day by hacking with an early soft mod of my OG Xbox. The hack required you to hot swap the IDE from the Xbox to the PC because they locked the HDD. I got it modded, but I needed to use a PCI HDD controller after that.

I used one of those towrlers for decades. Finally got rid ofnit in 2021. It was hacked uo over the years to get wster xooling it.

You can't debug everything at the same time. Booting linux first might give you a bill of health of the hardware, then you could tackle the windows side of things, because if memory serves, not all consumer versions of windows supported dual processors.

IDE Channel 1 might need resoldering?

for the harddrive you sure the jumpers on the harddrive are set correctly?

A few years ago I had a Gigabyte board with a 3rd gen Core i7. One day all the SATA ports just died. Totally nothing. I had to buy a PCIex SATA card.

Some older IDE disk drives had jumpers on them to determine master and slave. A drive set to slave won't work on a master channel. Is that Hard drive like this?

win2k is best version next to 7

I'm pretty sure the root of your problems is the south bridge, which indeed is responsible for usb and ide devices. I would try a reflow of the chip, but it could also be completely dead Fortunately is not that difficult to find as it was part of every pentium 3 ( and also early 462 motherboards) VIA powered system. In every case that motherboard were build like sh*t!

The belt is definetively bad ! When you remove it it, we can see that it's not round and doesn't go back to it's original form so you need to swap it !

HDD size greater than they BIOS supported size?

What grease do you use?

Seems like a ATAPI vs IDE issue. I see a lot of people in the comments suspecting the southbridge, which might be correct. But the fact ATAPI works makes me question the data lines instead. Perhaps the termination is at cause? Bad/broken resistor pack? Worth testing them if you can find them.

Have you checked that the harddrive need to be set to "single"? Just had that issue myself, and the drive needed to be set to single or else it just hang as yours did

Did you come across any issues booting from CD-ROM with this board? Is that why you used the 4 floppy disks? I'm, scratching my head why the board hangs when it tries to boot from the cd-rom drive.

normally I'd say the motherboard has a physical fault, but the fact that a bios flash fixed the USB, I can't say. BTW USB works just fine in windows ME.

What is the deal with the long squiggly traces (examples at 17:25)? Seems like they were intentionally made longer than they need to be.

I am pretty sure that CDROM is going to act up again unless the belt issues are sorted out. I recommend using reconditioning solutions designed for cars timing belts. Regarding HDD in 27:50 - is is set to "none", so don't expect too much from it unless it is changed to something reasonable. You should switch to Win98SE anyway, too much trouble with Me. I'd install WinXP just to test all the components.

windows 98/me can't properly address anything beyond 1gb of ram without patches, even at 1gb you'll see random issues best to stick with a max of 768mb if your going with a unmodded installation.

I think this is southbridge fault

if cdrom works but hdd doesn't wouldn't that mean that drive controller works in pio mode but not in udma/dma mode how about using 40 conductor harddrive tape instead of 80 conductor one so the controller has no choice but to work slower? also via chipsets are very sensitive to fsb overclocking which resoults in pci overclocking and ide controller is on pci bus so overclocking cpu up or down bu more than 33 mhz usually makes booting from ide impossible also if you ever going to network overclocked computer with pci card, never do it with realtek nic, get intel pci one because they can handle it technically realtek can also handle working as a nic but it drops packets and hangs up in few monutes after you boot i will wait and see if you ever make this thing working without replacing any major compontnts, also check if this board has a rtc battery bug, becaise many via boards kills 3v batteries by leaking 5v from power suply on them and you have to replace shorted diodes if that happens or you will never have working clock after removing power suply

The fact the devices were disappearing and reappearing makes me think you have an intermittent issue with the south bridge. Maybe that channel took a lot of abuse in the past and did a lot of thermal cycles and causing bad solder joints or worse the internal bond wires to break free.

what do you mean yopu don't have a key, all keyboard and front locks and harddrive cady keys should be the same happy first day of fall 2023