Thinkpads Forum

I have a Netvista 664x, that I've been piecing together to serve as a digital picture from along with a 15" LCD. I've put together innumerable desktops from parts, but am unfamiliar with any possible idiosyncacies with the Netvistas. This particular one seems to get through most of the load (either W2K or XPP) and then lock up on the load.

I've tried about every combination of Socket 370 CPU and RAM I can think of and so far; no joy. I have 2 Celerons (500/66, 900/100) and 1 PIII (733/133) and RAM ranging from sticks of 64Mb/100 to sticks of 512Mb/133 (with which I get the black screen). It looks like the chipset (intel 610 I think) is PC100.

Thoughts anyone?

Is your system an A40, or an A40p?? (Black, Netvista Desktop?)

Really need the full model number (in the format XXXX-XXX) to make any real determination. (A Netvista 6648, and Netvista 6649 are two, totally different machines.) This will be on a small sticker on the front of the machine, on the large sticker on the bottom of the machine, and also in the BIOs screen.

On the surface though, it looks like you have an Intel 815 Chipset board. Try the 733/133 CPU with the 512MB/PC 133 ram. After rebuilding and turning on for the first time, immediately enter the BIOs setup and load defaults, save and let it reboot.

Does it lock up on you as you are trying to install the OS? Or has the OS been installed, and then it locks up while booting?

The full model number is 6644-D1U. One of those dark grey cases with the blue front SSF. The HMM says that I can use the PC133 667, 733, 866 CPUs, although it says that all memory will run at PC100 with a 512Mb max. I just tried one of the single 512Mb chips which still gives me a black screen, so I'm now trying 2 64Mb PC133 chips. It boots to try and complete the load and then locks up, so I'll another reload.

It loaded through the first reboot, but consistently locks up during the "setting up devices" stage of the OS load. I've been at this machine all day.

Are you sure the CPU is getting enough (the correct amount) of cooling? I've seen what you're describing... CPUs heat up pretty fast, I've seen them not even make it through the boot before overheating.

Also, try booting from a WIN98 bootfloppy. If you can't get it to boot (and stay "on") then it's definitely a hardware issue.

And maybe stay away from the Celerons, since a number of them had many different core voltages, which might (or might not) be supported by your mobo.

The CPU is staying plenty cool. I don't even have the cover on it and the heatsink is barely warm to the touch. As is, the machine doesn't even have a floppy although, I'm supposed to be able to use a LS-120 in place of the CD-ROM and it should boot from it. That said; booting doesn't seem to be an issue, it boots fine from both an XPP and W2K disk, there seems to be something in the devices onboard that the OS doesn't like (neither one, I tried them both). It gets to a certain point on the load and hangs.

The CPU is known good, as are the RAM, HDD, and CD-ROM..... so I guess I'm down to a bad MB. I can't imagine that their's anything on a 810/815 chipset board that would throw a late SP1 XPP release.