Hello... this is not the other poster I see oddly posting a similar question
on the same day. Similar, but not the same.



I am still running that v3.1 with a Duron 1.3 and 2 128M SDRAM sticks.

The board has always run pretty fair w the exception of the time I tried to
run DDR which was a dismal failure. The only recent changes were to round
IDE cables in preparation for a new drive that I still have in the box and
that went well after struggling to get on to seat correctly. That was a
month ago, maybe and it has run fine since... till today:

I went to do a cold reboot from the XP partition to the 98 partition,
shutting it down completely first. When I powered back up it just sat there
flickering the CD drives back and forth and with the HD light on *almost*
steady. It sat there for a loooooong time and would not even give me the
first beep when it finds the video card before POSTing. It showed no POST or
CMOS screens and reported no Cheksum or other areas... the monitor power
light even sat there just blinking as if receiving no signal. I tried to
start it over and over and over again and got nowhere. I tried turning off
the PS and back on and nothing happened. I then unplugged and replugged the
power supply and it did boot... but it still sat there for much longer than
normal flickering back and forth between CD drives. I then tried to boot
normally and it would not. Then did the PS deal and it did. Tried again and
it didn't boot normally or after unplugging PS, then unplugged PS again and
it did.

I then tried doing the warm reboot from the restart button in Windows XP and
it did boot, but it sat there flickering CD drives for a very exaggerated
amount of time again. It would, however do a 'restart' even if slow. I even
booted back and forth between 98 and XP fine other than lag before starting
POST. When I did a cold boot, though, it would not and then after going
again it even did a cold one again... at which point I'm just going to leave
it up without shutdown for now.


I'm suspecting the unplug may be a red herring???

Is my NVRAM going tits up? Processor? IDE Controller? None of the above?

I considered resetting the BIOS, but just checked through once first and all
seemed to be in order there, so I didn't for fear of not pushing my luck by
rebooting to many more times until I have other directions to go here, too.

From the OS side, though I fail to see any relevancy, I got another one of
those 'lost communication' with printer errors the other day, that I
understand may be Windows buggering USB, a message that Paint Shop Pro did
something illegal when I closed it. And I got a Driver IRQL Not Less or
Equal message on an earlier reboot that referred to nVidia Capture Card
driver when I don't have a Capture and the subsequent blue screen and memory
dump. But I don't think these are related as they are all after the thing
tries to boot which this one never gets to the first beep when it struggles.



Any ideas on what's going on here? I'd hate to buy another board right now
as cash is tight, but I need my machine running well, too.

Try disconnect your cd drives and see if it then boots ok (the power
cables to them).
If so, then a weak power supply unit is indicated (maybe its fan is
clogged and it overheated).
Another thing to try is (first copy down your important BIOS settings)
and reset the BIOS by using the jumper while disconnected from the
wall outlet.
Try removing and reseating the ram modules.(maybe try just one at a
time to troubleshoot)
All these are easy to try and free.

"Jess Fertudei" <not (AT) this (DOT) juncture.com> wrote