PC died in move...HELP please!!

[cmacord]

I moved earlier this week, and when I put my old home-built desktop system, it failed to come up! I can hear the system power up and the boot drive start to whir, but all that is on the monitor is the bouncing RGB test pattern, with a message informing me that the monitor is working fine and I should check the cable and the PC.

I tested the system with another known-good monitor, and then with another known-good video card...in both cases, there was no change. I let it set overnight (superstition coupled with fatigue and frustration), and when I powered it up this morning, it started to boot normally, i.e., it was able to access the monitor for display. It showed the BIOS banner, the RAM POST count, and then the auto-detect sequence (it successfully found and identified both HDDs and the CDROM drive). However, after completeing the auto-detect sequence, it froze, and that was it...no more boot, no more information displayed, nada. Subsequent efforts to boot resulted in the failure to acquire the monitor described above...

I have opened the system and re-seated all the cards...I have even tried booting with all cards removed except the video card. I have also checked every connection I know to check, pressed them down to make sure they were fully seated (including the BIOS chip), even hit the innards with compressed air (not that it helps, but it always makes me feel better....heh). I have run out of things to try at this point. And the worst part about it is that even if I give up and buy a new system, I won't be able to get my stuff off the boot drive and the backup drive unless I remove them from the old system and hook them into the new one.

I need some help here, folks...does anyone have any idea what might be wrong, and what I might do to fix it? Or, if not, anything else I might try to find out what is wrong?

Thanks in advance,


Charlie Acord

P.S. This box is built on an Abit BX-6 Rev2 mobo, with a Celeron 2 566 mHz CPU, and runs Windows 98SE.

[zrocule642]

I would check everything again. Make sure the cables are all connected tight. Try different RAM, remove the ATX Power connector and re-seat it on the board.. If you tried another AGP card, try a PCI one. If you had and tried another PCI card, try an AGP one instead. You get the idea.

What is the VERY last thing you see while it's POSTING.?



Brian

[cmacord]

>> If you tried another AGP card, try a PCI one.

Don't have a PCI graphics card, but I will go over everything again in the morning just....for luck/karma whatever...


>>What is the VERY last thing you see while it's POSTING.?

It displays the BIOS banner, then counts thru the 384 MB RAM, then successfully auto-detects my boot drive, my second drive, my CDROM drive, and the the cursor drops down a line or two and that's all she wrote....

Thanks for your reply!!

[John Prophet]

strip it down to bare minimum configuration....limit the possibilities.

vid card, ONE stick ram, hd...see what it does there.

no modem, no floppy, no nic, no soundcard (if possible) etc

JP

[zrocule642]

I agree with JP. Strip it down to bare minimum to boot. Just the motherboard, Video card, 1 hard drive, one cd-rom. And actually.... for that matter. Try it without the cd-rom, or even the hard drive. See if it'll get to a point where it wants to boot off something. If removing the hard drive and/or cd-rom works... I'd say you have a bad IDE cable, or something got shocked. Moving stuff can make static.



Brian

[cadetstimp]

As a possible shortcut, try reseating the AGP and RAM cards before going down to bare minimum

WHoops...never mind! You already did that!

In going down to bare minimum also try disconnecting the HDD temporarily. The Mobo was damaged it might only be the IDE controller... easily fixed with moving to secondary or my using a card replacement.

If you still get a lock then I would say try using your components in another motherboard to try to determine if your mobo is bad.

(plug and play/PCI resource allocation is sometimes the first thing to go ion a bad mobo)