Note: I don't expect a solution, but if you do find one I would be extremely appreciative.

I managed to dig a dual pentium 3 workstation motherboard out of the back room of an IT department, I was looking for something with ISA slots so I could port my Soundblaster AWE64 over to a faster machine (There is NOTHING that does better MIDI then that, it's the entire reason I keep an old ISA computer around. DOSBOX doesn't even come close.). From a P2 233 to a P3 450 seems like a good step forward, So I went ahead and put it all together.The problem now is, it won't boot.It starts, the bios detects the drives, detects all the ram, etc. However it won't actually boot. It gets past POST and then just.. nothing. I can't find any errors, and I've unplugged anything except the floppy drive and can't get
it to boot.The motherboard is an Asus P2B-D, I've got a single 64MB PC100 stick in it, just the floppy connected.

then what happened

Then I forgot to copy paste the other half of the post, somehow.
E: Okay, I can only copy/paste one line at a time?

Is this like a joke? MIDI is MIDI. Any machine fast enough to play MIDI will play it identically to any other PC with any other sound card. The only thing that makes PCs sound different is the sound set they use for the MIDI (Any recent version of Windows uses Microsoft's GS Wavetable by default, which isn't the best but it's not horrible either, considering it's MIDI).

In my experience this AWE64 sounds better then DOSBOX. I'm no audiophile but I can hear the difference so here I am.

"This sound that is created in the exact same way as another method sounds better!"

Does it even attempt to read the floppy drive?

Nope, nothing.
Pretty sure it's ****ed.
Also CM stop being a jackass and trying to derail the thread over something stupid, thanks.

Some older mobos had to have a specific OEM OS and didn't work past a certain point otherwise. I know I've had that issue.

He's not derailing it over something stupid. Midi sounds awful no matter what hardware reproduces it.

Yes well I prefer it this way, so there. How can I tell if it needs an OEM OS?

Motherboard's battery might be empty? Try replacing it.

I replaced the CMOS, didn't appear to do anything.
I would be fine if this thing is broken, but this quantum state of both working and not working at the same time is like a puzzle, a puzzle I must solve.

Hardware conflicts could cause things like this.

It could be as simple as a slightly misplaced RAM chip or a half-loose IDE connector. It's happened to me. [/captainobvious]

yeah, try re-seating everything.. you never know..

Tried that, also tried ****ing around with jumpers and different slot one processors, nothing.

Can you get into the BIOS? What happens if you tap F8 repeatedly while booting up? If you put in a bootable CD, will it prompt you to "Press any key to boot from CD..." ? What is the output (wattage) of the PSU?

Yes I can get into the bios, the PSU is 330 watt and was previously running a P4 3.0 with no problems.
F8 did nothing.

What exactly are you trying to boot ON?

How does a sound card sound better than a piece of software? I don't think that is a valid comparison.

Anything, I've tried just the floppy, just the HDD, and just the CD. I've tried telling the BIOS to boot from each of them first, just the HDD, and just the floppy. It still just hangs after POST.

As a test, try turning the PC off and physically unplugging the HDD from data and power, then boot the PC. With no HDD to boot from, it should stop at the "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER." message or similar message. In other words, it should not just go black, but instead ask what to boot from. If it still goes black even with no HDD, perhaps it is a hardware issues.

I tried starting with nothing except RAM/CPU, still ****ed. I really just want to know WHAT is broken but I don't see how I could tell.

At this point? Probably the motherboard.

Yeah, I bet. It's just I've never seen anything like this before and the slim hope that it might not be totally ****ed leads me to keep trying, if anything just so I can say I win.

My guess would be a bad capacitor on the motherboard.

That's also what I'm going with now, damn thing wasted so much of my time for nothing.
Which of course makes me want to waste more time in order to make the time not wasted...

What happens when you mash the keyboard at the black screen

Nothing.
I've packed it up now, I even just tried running it out of the case with a different power supply and still nothing.
I'm sure I can aquire another pentium 3.