CPU unworkable? No HDs? BIOS is giving me a hard time

[elzmaddy]

Okay, this is weird.

This is an older system -- Celeron 300A I believe. I recently removed the RAM from it and I forgot that I did this, so nothing displayed when it booted up. I doubt this could have damaged something in any way? I tried a new video card before I noticed the obvious. Then I booted up and the BIOS is acting weird. It won't detect my two hard disks and won't get the right CPU settings. It won't even save them. The startup screen tells me: "CPU is unworkable or has been changed. Please recheck - CPU Soft Menu." No matter what I enter in the CPU settings, the system starts up with either 366Mhz or 550MHz. I also pulled out the CMOS battery and put in a fresh one. The RAM I put in was 64MB PC133 and 128MB PC100. I pulled out the PC133, same thing. I also tried pulling out the power cable and letting the system discharge for a few min. which sometimes clears things up, but same results. Weird. I've never seen this before. Any ideas? 😕

 

[elzmaddy]

I'm thinking the mainboard went bad. Anybody else agree?

 

[elzmaddy]

^bump

 

[Intelman07]

Sounds dead......good time to upgrade 🙂

 

[Budman]

CPU is unworkable or has been changed. Please recheck - CPU Soft Menu

Sound like an ABIT motherboard,if I remember correctly in the bios there's an option to turn off that cpu unworkable thing,look in CPU soft menu.

 

[elzmaddy]

So if the system will only run at 366MHz or 550MHz, regardless of what I put in the CPU Soft menu settings, it is safe to say that the motherboard and/or CPU is screwed up? Since those are overclocked speeds, Windows 2000 will not boot. Regardless of which is bad they will be replaced with something new. An upgrade originally wasn't necessary though becasue this system is just for my file backups.