Stumped

qBot

And I find myself back here again. I tell ya, my computer has cause me more grief than pleasure.

So, I arrive back at my house two nights ago to find that my computer has frozen. The screen is blank but the fan in the computer along with the hdd+power light are on. The computer was set to go into hybernation after one hour of no use but it wouldn't respond to mouse or keyboard interaction. So, I rebooted and i get as far as teh bios screen. I can't remember the exact text of what i got but the Award bios was looking for hte cpuid or something. It froze at this point without finding the answer. I rebooted and this time my screen stayed blank bar a very slight flashing in the top left hand corner of my monitor. At first i thought it was my graphics card or ram. But i swapped a friends ram into my computer and that didn't fix my problem. I had a friends machine that i was supposed to look at to see if i could get it working (It funnily enough had the same symptoms i had). I tried using his motherboard, his cpu, his ram, his graphics card but nothing worked. The one thing i'm almost sure about is that his motherboard works as he just got a new one last week to see if it would fix his computer.

They're are no beeps coming from the machine, the cpu heatsink doesn't get hot. The hd does give a little initialisation noise, but there is no indication that it's booting up windows. I'm completely lost. Oh I forgot to mention ( a major detail), my motherboard is blown cause one of the giant capacitors on it seems to have burst.

Anyone have any ideas..

System:

Athlon XP 2000+
Gigabyte Ga-7dxr+
Gainward Geforce 4 MX
NEC 3500A DVD-Burner
Seagate Barracuda 160gb drive
Zalman silent heatsink (Can't remember the model number)

Ruu_Old

did you try a boot cd or boot disk or some sort? Are you getting any kind of error code on the screen or just blank after bios?

angelofdeath

try the usual things like reseating ram, reseating cpu, graphics card, sound card, then reset the bios (theres probably a small jumper beside the cmos battery, just move it to the other two pins and back)

he wait i just saw your comment about one of the capacitors leaking, what you should do is check your components with you mates machine, if they are all working then you can definitely blame your mobo

qBot

Sorry for not getting back sooner, i'm not being sent emails for responses to this thread. I've tried all of the above. The problem with resetting the bios is that the jumpers aren't present, all that's there is little solder blobs where the pins should be. I'm gonna take my computer home to a friend at the weekend. His got an amd machine i can test it on. I've tested it on the friends machine but as i said i don't know what is working and what's not working in his machine..

qBot

Didn't try boot cd now, ill give it a lash but i don't think it'll work. I'm not getting anything on my monitor, it's just blank

paddy

Your going to have to get that blown cap replaced & then it should boot assuming the board isn't damaged from what caused it initially.

qBot wrote:

They're are no beeps coming from the machine, the cpu heatsink doesn't get hot. The hd does give a little initialisation noise, but there is no indication that it's booting up windows. I'm completely lost. Oh I forgot to mention ( a major detail), my motherboard is blown cause one of the giant capacitors on it seems to have burst.

Anyone have any ideas..

System:

Athlon XP 2000+
Gigabyte Ga-7dxr+
Gainward Geforce 4 MX
NEC 3500A DVD-Burner
Seagate Barracuda 160gb drive
Zalman silent heatsink (Can't remember the model number)

kmb

Jaysus,i remember the leaking capacitors myself!!!It was a problem with the abit kg6-7 boards.The capacitor was a JACKSON MAKE which boards manufacturers bought but was faulty after a time.
Your board is the same era i wonder...
Anyways to make a long story short a guy i know who does pcb repairs tried to mend mine with abit supplied capacitors but no good.
The boards were a 4 layer board.

Kind regards kieran.

MSI KM4AM-V, KM400A,Socket-A, m-ATX,LAN, ATA/SATA, Sound, VGA, AGP8X



Your price: €47.00

From komplett..

paddy

It looks like a pretty common issue link

Why could he not replace the caps. Kieran? the amount of layers should not make a difference if he has the right equipment.

kmb

He did replace it but it had the same problem so i scrapped it.I had 4 or 5 badly swollen ones.

regards kieran

qBot

paddy wrote:

It looks like a pretty common issue link

Why could he not replace the caps. Kieran? the amount of layers should not make a difference if he has the right equipment.

Ya, i saw tha article. The piece off radionics costs €5. I could solder it myself i'd say but then, i'd run the risk of breaking another processor if i did something wrong. I reckon it's 64 bit land for me. I'm off to komplett