You should at least see the startup messages like it's booting into DOS. Are you sure the hard drive is being detected?
If I do not plug in the hard drive, it says it's booting into "ROM-DOS". If I *do* plug in the hard drive, if I set the jumpers on the hard drive to limit the drive to 2GB, it goes through the motions but freezes right before it should say "Datalight Pages Memory Disk Installed as Drive C:". The BIOS will in fact show the hard drive name just fine.
If I plug in the hard drive and just set the jumpers to "slave" or "master" the machine just keeps rebooting like crazy within 2 seconds of powering on.
In both scenarios, the speakers make awful noises that are not there when there is no power going to the hard drive. I powered the hard drive on a different power supply and it still refused to boot, but the awful sound from the speakers went away.
You should at least see the startup messages like it's booting into DOS. Are you sure the hard drive is being detected?
The BIOS does show the hard drive while booting if I have the jumpers on the hard drive set to limit the hard drive to 2GB. If I do not have the jumpers set that way, the machine won't even boot with the hard drive in.
Have you tried cleaning the finger contacts on the IO board?
They are known for bad contacts. As the sound chip is also on that io board, it could explain those issues as well.
I did clean the contacts. It is funny you mention that because before cleaning the contacts, I would get a "PLEASE INSERT BOOT DISC" error like 80% of the time. Now that it's cleaned, I get this error instead.
I actually completely got rid of the "riser" board and I just plug both boards into each other directly. This is the full upright Megatouch, and I can put the machine back together with no riser board, so I am not even sure why they included it with this model.
There is jumpers on the IOboard you need change so it boots from hard drive instead of CD.
Which one?