opinions re: motherboard woes

hi ron i know absolutely nothing about motherboards but it been a while since i crossed paths with you so i thought i would say hi :-)

I just had this happen with a notebook PC. It wouldnt boot, even to do the POST and I assumed the CMOS battery was dead - turned out the motherboard was, and it had to be replaced.

DUnno if thats any help at all. Have you tried checking the CMOS battery?

hi donna how ya livin?

well, it seems unlikely that the battery is dead, because the board is only about a month or so old. full disclosure: i think i goofed the cmos clear - i had the computer off, but the power supply still plugged in and turned on. removed battery, moved jumper, wait, replace jumper and BAM computer powers up as soon as the jumper hit default position, so it got juice with the battery out. i susped that this might be why it's dead.

from what little research i did, i have high hopes that getting the chip reprogrammed will bring the board back to life. i don't know for sure however

ps got the kvm switch, so am really excited to have the second computer :-)

another annoying thing with this mobo is that it has never, from day one, given me any post messages. so i have no feedback from the board at all about what's going on. but it doesn't even power up the monitor or anything. just sits there with the fans running and the hard drive led on.

plus now i've pulled the processor and put it back into my old mb to get a comp working so i could hit the net looking for answers. so i can't right now experiment on it.

i guess if it were working, i could still get a post error for no processor though

Yeah Id've thought so. Unfortunately I cant suggest much else, my hardware knowledge is next to nowt :(

Good luck tho!

can anyone confirm that powering up the board with no battery installed is a problem?

I don't see why that'd kill the board any more than powering it up with a dead battery; the battery is just there to make sure your settings don't get wiped out.

There's an option with most modern BIOSes to "silent" boot, which means no information is displayed, but usually you get the first screen which says what the board and BIOS is...unless it's a major manufacturer like HP or whatnot, and they've set it to a graphic instead. You can just hit DEL or ESC to bring up the POST info if that's the case, usually, and then it will tell you how to get into your BIOS settings to change all that crap.

If you have the manual for your board, read it and make sure you're following the CMOS clear settings to the letter, and then try it again. If it's dead you may be able to just swap out the BIOS chip with another one with the save revision, even if it's from a different kind of board. Since most of them are Award chips these days, usually they're pretty similar.

Was anything happening at all when you tried to start up the board after the incident? Were the fans turning on? Any lights? And did you make absolutely sure that everything inside the computer was connected properly after you went rooting around in there to change the CMOS jumper? (ie you didn't nudge the video card slightly out of socket, or maybe the memory? All power connectors to the board are still firmly attached?)

i get fans on, hard drive light is steady on (even now that i've removed the hard drives and the processor. no power to the monitor, or any other action that i can detect.

Did you check to see if any of the capacitors popped? I know this was a big problem with lots of motherboards from a couple of years ago. Some Chinese manufacturers screwed up the paper filament somehow and they happened to be the only supplier for all the caps in all the Taiwan mbs manufacturing. This happened to a board of mine nine months ago. It did something very similar to what you're talking about.

Just check on the top of the caps to see if there's any silvery or brown mess coming out of the top.

Sean's other diagnostic advice OTM.

hmm i don't see any messes in there right now. i've been reading some other forums re: this board and have found a few ideas, but none have worked yet. i think i need to get a processor on there to keep playing with it.

i would like to put the mobo cd in the drive so it could look for a bios on there, but i can't even open the cd tray :-(

one suggestion was to power up the computer with the cmos clear on 2-3jumpers, but it won't turn on with them in that position.

got my new chip today from badflash.com. fired right up.

then tried to network the two computers, and promptly got blaster virus on the other one, i think not coincidentally, because of fooling with network settings and running some dodgy proxy program.

will buy second copy of xp so that the other computer is legit and can get all the updates.

i couldn't get the two comps talking though - kept flashing on and off "network cable unplugged" - maybe updating the second windows installation will help??

i just hot-flashed the old bios chip, which was f-in SCARY!! ;-) but now hopefully i have a backup chip in case this happens again (the old one's in and working now, and i'm not going to switch back presently)