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Dell BLOWS! Dell Dimension 4600C Post Problems

C

chicsdiggit

Member
I am working on a comp, P4 2.8 on 800 MHZ FSB, 512 MB Infineon DDR 400, Seagate Barracuda 7200 (120 Gig), with DVD RW, and no floppy drive. It is Phoenix BIOS version A04. I believe it is a Foxconn Mobo.

My problem is it won't post at all, nor will it allow me to enter the BIOS. I get the Dell screen, and it loads to a specific point and then....nothing. Even when I try to enter setup, it will load to that same point and then do nothing. I took out the BIOS battery for about 5 minutes and disconnected the power, hoping it would revert to normal. That failed. Also, I attempted to boot from a CD, and that failed as well. Being unable to enter into the BIOS, or the OS, I am stuck for ideas. have any?

Oh yea, it also has error LED lights in the back, ABCD, which can be in three states, off, green, and yellow. The error message is Gr Y Y Gr. There is nothing in the manual that indicates what that message means.
 
Internal options such as? I don't know what happened, I just got the problem. The only thing they told me was that their nephew was using the computer, and when they got back to use it there were certain cords unplugged. Who knows, maybe he spilled something on it. Any ideas would be great, thanks.

If there were Mobo probs, would it almost post, but not quite? The status bar froze about 95% of post.
 
If you get as far as the Dell logo then it probably IS POSTing. Dells don't display a POST progress unless you enable it in BIOS.

I would suspect it's hanging on HDD detection (older Dell mobos are notorious for this - they have VERY long HDD timeouts). I would recommend you pull all cards except the video card, and disconnect all EIDE devices (HDDs and CD-Rom drives). Then turn it on and walk away. Have a cigarette or a cup of cofee and come back in 5 minutes. You should see an error message and an option to enter BIOS.

If that works there's probbaly nothing wrong with the mobo (although it's still possible the HDD controller is toast - just unlikely).

You'll have to diagnose the drives to see if there's a dead drive, bad or dirty ribbon cable, etc.

Just keep in mind that old Dells ALWAYS sit for minutes and timeout if they don't see the correct number of drives configured. For instance if BIOS is configured for a master and a slave on one ribbon, but BIOS only detects one of the drives on POST, the Dell will sit there for a few minutes waiting for the drive to respond before it times out.

Hope this helps...
 
Thanks FlyingPenguin, that seems like very helpful and good advice. I will look into it and let you guys know. I should be back to check it out in a couple of days. Thanks for all the help.
 
Display Pattern: GYYG
Run Test Set: MBF CPU register test failure
CMOS RAM test failure
Timer 0 and 1 failure
DMA channel 0 and 1 failure
Page register failure
Verify refresh failure
Keyboard controller failure
DMA port failure
Interrupt mask register failure
Timer tick failure
System shutdown failure
Super I/O failure (Parallel port)
 
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