My Pc was acting weird laterly, it would take a long time (up to around
3 min) frozen in the BIOS presentation screen before eventually booting
up. A couple of times it did reset completely, not even giving windows
bluescreen.

Until yesterday when it finally gave up. When I turn it on now the hard
drive would start spinning, lights on the cd and dvd rom flash, CPU
fan, Video Board's fan, case fan start spinning, everything seems to
strart working fine, the monitor turns on but no signal at all. No BIOS
screen, no audio alerts like when there are CPU or RAM problems.

This is what I've tried already:
-Removes BIOS battery for a full day. Tested it and has full charge.
-Removed all boards, usb conectors, all drives but the hard drive.
-Removed and re-seated the CPU and fan
-Removed 1 DIMM so that only 1 would remain on.

I don't know what else to do. COuld the Video Board be causing this? Or
a faulty BIOS is more like it? Also, could the Power Supply be
outputting less voltage that needed? I couldn't test its output
voltage.

P4 3.0 800 MHz
INTEL D865PERL Mobo
2x512 184-pin DDR 400 SDRAM DIMMs
ATI 9700Pro
Creative Sound Blaster Live!
80gb Maxtor HD.
Floppy, CD-Rom, DVD-Rom
350 watt PSU

Any ideas?
Thank you,
Paiasoloco

On 26 May 2005 20:22:33 -0700, "Paiasoloco" <fcalvo (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:


You're going to hate this answer: it could be the power supply, video
card, mb or cpu. That's the order I'd replace things in, anyway.

Paiasoloco: I suggest you obtain and run the hardwaare diagnostics.
In many cases these are in a separate partition.

Skip Knoble, Penn State GEaRS

On 26 May 2005 20:22:33 -0700, "Paiasoloco" <fcalvo (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

-|My Pc was acting weird laterly, it would take a long time (up to around
-|3 min) frozen in the BIOS presentation screen before eventually booting
-|up. A couple of times it did reset completely, not even giving windows
-|bluescreen.
-|
-|Until yesterday when it finally gave up. When I turn it on now the hard
-|drive would start spinning, lights on the cd and dvd rom flash, CPU
-|fan, Video Board's fan, case fan start spinning, everything seems to
-|strart working fine, the monitor turns on but no signal at all. No BIOS
-|screen, no audio alerts like when there are CPU or RAM problems.
-|
-|This is what I've tried already:
-|-Removes BIOS battery for a full day. Tested it and has full charge.
-|-Removed all boards, usb conectors, all drives but the hard drive.
-|-Removed and re-seated the CPU and fan
-|-Removed 1 DIMM so that only 1 would remain on.
-|
-|I don't know what else to do. COuld the Video Board be causing this? Or
-|a faulty BIOS is more like it? Also, could the Power Supply be
-|outputting less voltage that needed? I couldn't test its output
-|voltage.
-|
-|P4 3.0 800 MHz
-|INTEL D865PERL Mobo
-|2x512 184-pin DDR 400 SDRAM DIMMs
-|ATI 9700Pro
-|Creative Sound Blaster Live!
-|80gb Maxtor HD.
-|Floppy, CD-Rom, DVD-Rom
-|350 watt PSU
-|
-|Any ideas?
-|Thank you,
-|Paiasoloco

In message <vh9e91trs2408mgsjkkor4mjqehhh3ee5e (AT) 4ax (DOT) com>, Chris Hill
<hillco (AT) earthlink (DOT) net> writes
The only time this happened to me (similar problems), it was caused by
the Motherboard - did you notice that any CMOS values started to change
(e.g. current time) before the big freeze up?

--
Jeremy Boden

Previously Chris Hill <hillco (AT) earthlink (DOT) net> wrote:

I second that. You might want to first borrow a normal video card
somewhere, i.e. one that does not draw a significant amount of power.
If it works with that, then you have narroved it down to video card
or PSU.

Arno

You could replace all those things and still not have a
working machine. The symptoms are also common to a
problematic disk drive. Just another example of why
shotgunning is performed by those who don't first learn.
Shotgunning takes longer and costs more money.

First learn. Responsible computer manufacturers provide
comprehensive diagnostics for free - both with the machine and
on their web site. Otherwise download diagnostics from
component manufacturers or third party diagnostics. Does
computer also take forever to boot from floppy - either the OS
or from comprehensive diagnostics? That learned fact goes a
long way to identify a suspect - long before we swap anything.

If your car mechanic shotgunned, you would call it a scam.
Why is computer repair any different? Its not. Just that
some people want to fix things rather than first learn what is
wrong.

BTW, the system (event) logs may have been reporting what is
wrong long ago. Again, an example if 'first learning' or
preventing total failure before it can happen. Superior
operating systems record the problem, then work around that
problem so a human can solve the problem later. But again, it
requires the human to first learn.

Is it a power supply. The 3.5 digit multimeter would have
answered that question in less than 2 minutes and long ago.
Just another example of first learning. Those who never
learned how to work smarter promote shotgunning.

Chris Hill wrote:

Paiasoloco wrote:

did you start it with only the hd, keyboard, video +/- a memory chip?

make sure the cpu is secure...

yes it could be... try another psu or test it with a voltmeter

since from what you describe seems that you cannot use a hw diags if it's
not running...
i'd try another video card first.

if no go, test the power supply (with a voltmeter) or if you have another
psu that works try it...
(as above
and ensure that the connectors from the psu to the motherboard are secure
(likely not the problem) but could reseat them...

make sure that the memory chip that you have is good and try IT in each
slot (individually) (1 slot at a time)

if these don't work, i'd unplug everything except the video card (and
monitor), hard drive (OR floppy drive (perhaps with a boot disk)) the
keyboard, and see if you get anything...
(i guess you did this -- did you do this with no memory chips in? if not
try that)

but again imVHo try another video card...
post back with results...

Thanks All for the ideas.

Update:
I had my diagnosis completely wrong, it turned out that it was the
monitor that died. I had initially thought that it was the PC that had
failed and was attempting to reboot.

What threw me off was that the PC was taking too long to boot up in the
first place as I mention in my original post. It's like 5 minutes that
I had to wait until it eventually gets off the stupid INTEL branded
bios startup screen and continue booting. I thought this was another
problem altogether and never did wait long enough for the os to start
loading under the black screen. Mind you, my monitor screen was black.
It would receive the signal and turn on the "powered on" green light so
it never occurred to me that it could have been the monitor.

This is why I wasn't getting the BIOS sound alerts also. Anyhow, I
thought it was the BIOS, so I downloaded a repair BIOS from Intel,
copied it in a floppy, removed the jumper to tell the MoBo to do its
thing and the BIOS was repaired this way. This didn't fix it, so I
sneaked into the office during the weekend and snatched the Soyo
TechAid Diagnosis board from the IT's office which is proving quite a
'life saver' lately.

Installed it and turned on the PC. I was getting POST code 85 on my AMI
BIOS (Display any soft error message) and it was stuck there
indefinitely, thus never fully booting. And here's the tricky part, I
was supposed to be getting the error message on-screen, BUT it turned
out that the monitor had died at the same time. And no matter how much
I waited this time, the OS won't load. With my BIOS repair procedure I
had returned to the defaults and it was trying to let me know that I
had the second Dual Channel memory DIMM wrongly positioned. I didn't
know that they should be placed across channels instead os filling 1
channel first. Anyways, I had dismissed this message when I first
installed the DIMMS but it reappeared after reset.

That's when I went back to the office and snatched one of my monitors,
just to see what the hell was going on. I plugged it and there it was!
The message waiting for my input. So now I have a useless 22" beast CRT
sitting at home waiting to be trashed or... something.
$420 and a SyncMaster 930B flat panel later, I'm still facing the very
slow boot. It is freezing on POST code 38 which apparently means
"Memory below 1MB is initialized". Also, the PC would reboot out of the
blue, not even an XP bluescreen is shown. So, I have more research to
do tonight and back to the POST codes debugging

Paiasoloco

Did you hear those transistors inside saying, "Gotcha"?

Note the trend. How long would you have been there swapping
parts? How much money would you have spent on new parts that
did not solve anything? Good techs have simple tools to learn
facts rather than spend both time and money on "shotgunning".
You fixed the problem ... AND .... because you know why the
problem was, then you also know that problem is really fixed.

Paiasoloco wrote:

Since you are concerned about learning, may I suggest you learn a
little about teaching Tom? Your post has no lesson that I could
possible learn from. In fact I believe you didn't even READ what I
posted in the first place.

Lesson nr 1 about teaching AND learning: Understanding the problem is
the fist and most important step towards solving it.

Maybe it was my poor description of the problem, but you did poorly
interpreting it also. For example, hard drive has nothing to do with
the problem I described. My problem occurs before the HD can even start
to be an issue. In fact, I can completely remove it and wouldn't be a
difference. It all stops at the BIOS level. BIOS as I'm sure you have
learned is stored in ROM, and can start successfully and without
reported errors even without a hard drive. This allows for booting off
of a floppy, network or even a USB device. Eventually and if you don't
have any of these boot devices, it would give a message that a boot
drive is missing but at this point all BIOS operations started
successfully.

Another one, what do the system logs have to do with these problems?,
again, the OS is not even aware of any problems because this is at a
lower level. Ay ay ay, I don't even know why I even bother.

Thank you for your reply though it was... enlightening
Paiasoloco