With the PC fully assembled, all that remained to do was to power it on and brace for impact. I pressed the power button and ... nothing happened. Not even a fan moving or the PSU humming. My worst fear had just materialized and I started to envision hours of troubleshooting. I pressed again and this time the machine came to life. And it POSTED! It was not a great sign but I was nonetheless overjoyed!
I pressed the power button to stop the machine and it kept on running. I pressed the power button multiple times but the machine refused to turn off. Et merde. Here goes my Sunday.
I had to unplug the power cord from the wall to turn it off. Something was definitely not working well. After plugging it back, the power button would work sporadically. My suspicion was that the PSU had aged poorly.
Having spare parts is the best tool in an retro-enthusiast arsenal. I had a SF750 ATX corsair PSU laying around so I gave it a try to see if that would fix the issue. However I realized that ATX had been upgraded to v2 with extra pins on the molex connector in 2003.
Checking out the layout revealed that the new connectors were backward compatible, it looked like, in theory, plugging a 24-pin molex into a 20-pin receptacle on the motherboard would work. That was definitely in the category of "you want to do what?" and it would look super weird but I could be tried. So I did.
Now that disembowelled PC lying on its side, on life support, really made me feel like it was 1997 again.
I pressed the power button and it turned on flawlessly. Pressed it again and the machine turned off immediately. The problem was solved. All I had to do now was to find a way to fasten it to the case.
Besides the ridiculousness of using a 750 Watts PSU in a system based on a 8 Watts CPU (Pentium MMX 233Mhz), the uncanny 24-pin molex plugged into a 20-pin connector, the SF750 also happened to be too tiny. The holes to fasten it to the case did not line up.
And that was to be expected since a SF form factor PSU is to be used in a Small Form-factor ITX PCs. However Corsair has the good idea to include an ATX adapter that could be mounted on the back of the SF750.
It worked like a charm. I was actually happy to get rid of that multicolor octopus abomination. It is for sure one thing from 1997 I won't miss.
Besides having a more reliable power supply, upgrading the PSU allowed it to drastically tidy up the inside of the machine. I am pretty sure my actual setup from 2001 and its mess of ribbon is where some of my OCD comes from.
I bought a white Corsair Type 3 6-pin to 4x Molex to power the HDD and CD-ROM. I also got a 5.25 Molex to 3.5 Floppy Drive 4 Pin adapter to power the FDD.
Surprisingly I did not run into any other problem. At that point the hardware was completed.
Time to focus on the software!
