Soyo 7IS2 Troubles

[evilcagey]

Hi everyone,

You all seem pretty helpful around here, so I thought I'd give this a try.

I've been having some problems with my computer recently, and it's puzzling me to no end... hopefully someone can shed some light on the situation.

I have a Soyo 7IS2, P3-866, 512mb ram. 250w power supply, GeForce2 Ti video.

A couple days ago, after locking my computer (Win2k), shutting off the monitor and heading to bed, I heard it shutdown, then restart... but when it restarted, the creepy voice doctor thing said "The processor might be damaged or improperly installed. Damage/discharge(d?) lithium battery."

I have been using this computer with this exact setup for over a year now...

Now, I've been messing with it all day, and eventually I got to the point where I disconnected everything but the power supply. Then when I tried turning it back on, it said the same damaged or installed improperly message, but this time about the VGA card!

So... I put in just the video card. Now it just sits there. No beeps, no voices, no POST, no anything. Just a black screen.

I'm completely lost here, anyone have ideas?

The only thing I can come up with is perhaps the power supply gave out... but I'm not willing to spend the money on a new one without a second opinion or 10.

Thanks in advance.

For the PC to POST, you need to have at least this;

CPU
RAM
Video Card
Floppy Drive

Hook all those up and see if you get the PC to POST.

[evilcagey]

Hi,

I never removed the RAM or the CPU (except to see if reseating it would work), I guess I should have been more clear with that.

After some more messing with it:

I connected the video and floppy as well and tried again... blank Screen... no beeps, etc.

I have tried another video card, same results.

I have two sticks of ram, so I took one out and tried that. Same things. I switched the sticks thinking one was maybe bad. Same results.

One more thing I just remembered (It's been a long day, I'm sorry)... in order to get past the "Processor might be damaged..." voice, I have to turn it on, leave it powered up for a few minutes, then turn it off and immediately back on. Only then will it go to the VGA card message...

Thanks...

Did you notice if the CPU's fan is turning?

My first guess would be the PSU gave out and is maybe not powering the fan(s) thereby giving you that warning.

Have you pullled the PSU connector from the board and then reattached it? Sometimes that will "reset" the PSU and it will work properly again. A thermal overload safety switch of some sort.

[evilcagey]

Hi,

Well, somehow or other last night I got it booting fine... still not sure how, I guess it just decided to cooperate.

So it was working fine all day... until about 15 minutes ago. I am trying to do a clean install of Win2k on a new hard drive I bought today (WD 40GB, ATA-100, should work fine with the MB), and during the formatting part of the install, the computer just powered down... and the processor message came back.

I tried this twice, once the first time as NTFS, the second as FAT32. During the first, it just powered down and came right back up... I thought it errored or something, as I wasn't paying attention... so I tried the FAT32. It got to 65% and just shut off... no errors or warnings. It powered back on, and did the processor message.

So... now I'm back where I started.

I hope someone has some advice... this is getting very frustrating.

And to answer your last questions, all the fans are spinning, cpu, case, video card.

I did try the unplugging the connector and putting it back in, as well.

Thanks

edit:
Last night as well, I did try a spare 200w PS I have sitting around... with just the cpu, ram, floppy, and video card. It produced the same results, so I think that can be ruled out. Unless 200w isn't enough for that.

[Barak_P]

If you can get ahold of a 300w or more PSU I would try that before you rule out the possibility. From the sounds of it that is what the problem is if I had to guess, but you never know for sure with things like this sometimes.

Barak