Fish
05-17-2003, 12:08 PM
Hi everyone,
I'm new to this board ... just registered this morning. All last night and all this morning I was completely freaking out, chain smoking, fending off the wife because I apparently broke our PC. I was just swapping the CDR's between two boxes when suddenly our main one wouldn't reboot.
It would beep once as it started up ... the normal "Hi I'm awake" beep, not a POST beep.
It would display the bios, the vba bios, flash the keyboard lights, and display the CPU make and speed, then STOP. NO Beeps, no error messages, nothing. It looked like this:
---------------------------------------------------------
Award Modular Bios blah blah blah
Copyring t1984-99 blah blah
P2BXA Ver:D.4
PENTIUM III CPU AT 450 MHZ
-
-------------------------------------------------------------
and the cursor just hung there. Life was starting to really suck at this point. Wow, it's amazing how having your pc spread across the office floor can actually introduce marital problems :)
I stripped everything out. Pulled the drive cables and power cables, pulled out all cards except the VBA and tried again. Same thing.
I pulled the VGA and tried, hoping for beep codes. I got beeps - 1long 3 short which is VGA. That was a start I guess.
I reseated the CPU again, pulled all the memory out. Just gave one continuous tone, wouldn't boot at all.
I rebooted with a different RAM stick in each time, got the same message (PIII at 450, hung).
Finally, I'm not sure why I tried this because logically it doesn't make sense to me ........ I pulled the CMOS battery, rubbed the contacts with an eraser, reinstalled battery. Now it boots up fine, goes through the post and then stops at the CMOS CHECKSUM ERROR _ DEFAULTS LOADED. Obviously I still have more work to do because I have to reinstall all the cards/drives and reconfigure, but at least now it's booting in predictable behaviour.
I wanted to share this with everyone in case it can help someone else. THere are various posts that say things like "reseat", "change the battery" etc but I wanted to write one succinct thread describing the whole process I went through, so hopefully it will save someone from having to search through lots of other threads/message/sites etc.
By the way, this is a great forum. I'm glad I registered, and I've bookmarked it as well ;)
- FishyFish
"I got what I wish".
I'm new to this board ... just registered this morning. All last night and all this morning I was completely freaking out, chain smoking, fending off the wife because I apparently broke our PC. I was just swapping the CDR's between two boxes when suddenly our main one wouldn't reboot.
It would beep once as it started up ... the normal "Hi I'm awake" beep, not a POST beep.
It would display the bios, the vba bios, flash the keyboard lights, and display the CPU make and speed, then STOP. NO Beeps, no error messages, nothing. It looked like this:
---------------------------------------------------------
Award Modular Bios blah blah blah
Copyring t1984-99 blah blah
P2BXA Ver:D.4
PENTIUM III CPU AT 450 MHZ
-
-------------------------------------------------------------
and the cursor just hung there. Life was starting to really suck at this point. Wow, it's amazing how having your pc spread across the office floor can actually introduce marital problems :)
I stripped everything out. Pulled the drive cables and power cables, pulled out all cards except the VBA and tried again. Same thing.
I pulled the VGA and tried, hoping for beep codes. I got beeps - 1long 3 short which is VGA. That was a start I guess.
I reseated the CPU again, pulled all the memory out. Just gave one continuous tone, wouldn't boot at all.
I rebooted with a different RAM stick in each time, got the same message (PIII at 450, hung).
Finally, I'm not sure why I tried this because logically it doesn't make sense to me ........ I pulled the CMOS battery, rubbed the contacts with an eraser, reinstalled battery. Now it boots up fine, goes through the post and then stops at the CMOS CHECKSUM ERROR _ DEFAULTS LOADED. Obviously I still have more work to do because I have to reinstall all the cards/drives and reconfigure, but at least now it's booting in predictable behaviour.
I wanted to share this with everyone in case it can help someone else. THere are various posts that say things like "reseat", "change the battery" etc but I wanted to write one succinct thread describing the whole process I went through, so hopefully it will save someone from having to search through lots of other threads/message/sites etc.
By the way, this is a great forum. I'm glad I registered, and I've bookmarked it as well ;)
- FishyFish
"I got what I wish".