Quote:
Originally Posted by Nate Owens  Pete...
I now have a speaker attached... having discovered the diagram in the post above showing where to connect it.
I have everything connected at boot... drive, keyboard, monitor, sound card, graphic card and 2 sticks of 2 gig ram... so I guess the thing to do is (based on whatever beeps I hear or don't at next start up) would be to start pulling components to see if one is a problem...
As you said, I think I will take the entire thing down (except pulling the mobo) and rehook it all.. maybe if something isn't right that will do the job.. if not, on to plan b. |
I build a lot of PC's for family and friends (myself too, but not recently, no disposable cash right now ;().
Anyway, I would suggest the following course of action, and, you are somewhat on the path I would suggest already.
1) Remove every card, reinstall only the bare essentials, including installing only one of the two RAM chips. Make sure you use the correct slot for single RAM, and if you end up putting the two back in, make sure you are using the right RAM slots for "dual channel", if that is what you're doing. Sometimes boards will only take dual channel memory on two specific slots.
2) Try to get the thing to post.
3) If it doesn't, switch RAM chips.
4) Try to boot/post again.
5) Ensure that the video card is in tight and not misaligned. I generally suggest putting the video card in "without" screwing it to the case at first. I've found that you can get it in correctly without screwing it into the case, but sometimes when screwed down it will sometimes "skew" the card in a way that messes up the connections. Although, this problem typically causes constant beeping, rather than just a blank screen, but it can go both ways.
6) If you have another video card in another machine, that will work on your board, try installing that board to rule out the video card.
7) If at that point it still won't load the BIOS and show up on the monitor, try clearing the CMOS again. If that doesn't work, it could be the motherboard is bad.
In general, if you "do" get the BIOS to show up on video, make sure you download memtest86 and make a boot CD on your other PC.
http://www.memtest86.com/
Test the memory with both sticks in place. Also, make sure that all the potential "sharing" of memory is turned off in the BIOS, if it has this feature, otherwise it will crash memtest86.
I also typically go into the BIOS and disable anything I know I'm not going to use, such as the IRQ's that are assigned to the parallel port (unless you have a parallel port printer), as well as the serial port (unless you use this for something). I find PC's run a LOT better when ample IRQ's are available for components as Windows sharing is still "iffy" even to this day. If you have an external sound card, make sure you disable the onboard sound in the BIOS as well, this will free another IRQ.
I'll try to think of some other options.
Good luck.
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