Do I have a dead motherboard?

[mhayden]

Here's the background --

Came home last night to a frozen Windows. Not responding to mouse or keyboard.

Rebooted. System booted WINXP up fine, but I was getting runtime errors on any application I tried to run like MS Outlook.

Rebooted again -- no beeps, no video signal. Hard drive is accessed for about 20 seconds, but then nothing.


What I've done:

Reset CMOS
Removed all cards but video card
Swapped out AGP Video card for PCI video card
Removed my 2nd stick of memory

After removing the memory, the system booted and did the normal system checks and diagnostics. Then when it started to load WinXP, it just stayed at a black screen. There was however a video "signal" where there wasn't one before.

Thought maybe it was a drive issue, so I swapped the PCI card out for the AGP one. Went back to having no signal at all. So I went back to the PCI card -- and now I'm stuck with no signal again.


Anyone have any idea what it could be or what I could try to do to fix it?

My system specs are 1.2ghz Celeron overlocked to 1.8... Had it for about 4 years.

 

[Harvey]

It may be your motherboard, but too many things still work so it may be something else.

You may not be getting a vid signal because the default CMOS setting for the vid card may be to look for a PCI card, first. If possible, try going back to your PCI card, and checking the CMOS. If it is set to look for a PCI card, set it to look first for an AGP card.

It sounds like your windows installation may be corrupt, or something else may be the problem.

Try disconnecting your hard drive and booting from a floppy. I helped a friend just last night where his hard drive was so FUBAR that it just having it connected screwed up everything else. My friend's system wouldn't boot, and when I slaved his drive to my machine, I could read the files on his drive, but I couldn't connect to the web, and other things acted weird.

Everything on my machine was back to normal once I removed his drive from my system. The only fix was to reinstall Windows and copy his critical files from his drive (while hoping it stayed stable long enough to do so). It worked.

Before you do that, if you can get into the CMOS, try to find the setting, Reset Configuration Data. It is often under PnP/PCI Configuration, but it may vary depending in some setups. This will only work on your next reboot so you won't have to unset it, later, if it works.

Good luck.