old XL
hi everyone.
I got an old Alpha XL 266, and was going to install debian on it.
Whenever I flipped the switch, it would beep at me a couple of times and
not go anywhere. The keyboard LEDs would flash, the hard drive would spin
up, the floppy would access, but nothing on screen.
Last night, I took the entire thing apart, cleaned up the inside (it was
pretty dusty), and put it all back together again, and it works fine
now. What was the beep for? Was some electrical thing being shorted
somewhere? What did I miss?
(The other thing is, inside the case there is a power wire going to the
case fan, and another pair of wires in the same area that are white. When
I short the two white wires together, the power supply fan and the case
fan both jump to much greater RPMs. Should I run it like this, or without
the high speed? The CPU/riser board gets pretty hot to the touch without
it. Also, before I opened the case, the wires had some weird taped
contraption that looked like they were beig shorted out, but I couldn't
tell--I cut it off.)
And is it cool that if the case fan isn't plugged into the power supply,
when you flip the switch the power supply will kick up to +5V, then die
down and the fan will stop? If the fan's plugged in it works perfectly.
Anyway, I'm planning on installing potato now, wish me luck. ;-)
Andy MacNamara
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