Fakkin POS ECS P4ITA mobo wont finish POST EDIT: FIXED

[Bacinator]

My POS ECS P4ITA mobo wont finish POST. It has worked fine for over a year, but I've been havin some problems as of late. I'll start with current problem, system setup, then recent problems.

Current:
System powers on, enter's POST, confirms memory, offers to start setup, and acknowledges IDE devices, screen goes blank, cursor flashing in top right (_ type cursor, not box), and proceeds to do nothing from there. Will not boot from floppy, cuz the screen after it hangs is usually the IRQ display screen, then it would proceed to boot from a drive. So it never gets to the point when it looks for an OS to load. I am assuming this is a BIOS error, but I am unsure how to remedy it. I have tried shorting the cmos battery (to reset it), and have tried "Load Fail-Safe deaults" in BIOS, but no joy. I checked chip, just to be sure there was no burn marks, and there wasn't, because the system was never oc'd. Stumped am I, but thinking this $217 (in 2001) piece of s**t mobo just went belly up.

Pentium 4 S423 1.6ghz
ECS P4ITA mobo (http://www.ecsusa.com/products/p4ita.html) [Award BIOS v1.0]
4 sticks of Corsair 128mb pc800 rambus
GeForce2 MMX 400
SB Live! 5.1 Gamer
1 Netgear, 1 Linksys NIC
1 empty/formatted Maxtor 40gb drive
1 CDRW, 1 DVD
1 3.5" Floppy
1 PCI modem (forget brand)

Previous:
Had recently re-installed windows on a new 40gb drive, in an attempt to salvage the previous installation which was on a 120gb drive. 120gb drive was readable after boot, but would not boot itself due to ARC and HAL configuration errors. Had not re-installed much on the 40gb drive, because I am anticipating putting all the goods on my 2100xp/Asus Deluxe (arriving later this week). So I was toying around a bit with benchmark (SiSandra), and benchmarked my 40gb drive. I believe this somehow corrupted the drive, because after installing a windows IE6 SP1 security update, I restarted and it would post, and start windows, but would self-restart towards the end part of the "window home loading" screen. It did this continually, and I tried booting in safe mode, noticing that it would still self-restart, and the last file it would process before booting had something to do with agp440, I think.
So I tried reformatting the drive, but kept getting blue screens when I selected either "Recovery" or "Format ntfs" (for new xp install), so I used max blast to format the drive to Fat32, hoping that XP would then format it ntfs.
Windows xp would then fail on a "Quick ntfs" format, and hung without progress on ntfs at standard speed.
I cleared the cmos, hoping to start fresh, and clear out whatever was hosing up the system. But thats when I got the "No finish post" error, as listed at the top of this post. I have never flashed the BIOS, though I did try once, and it wouldn't due to "incorrect BIOS version" (which I got from the ECS page... pooheads). So I continued on without the bios upgrade, and all was dandy until today.

Any ideas? Hopefully I'm a retard, and it's something simple.

Also, kinda odd. Today, my computer wouldn't acknowledge my USB hub/printer/Zip Drive. Dont think it's related, but I wouldn't want to leave any info out of possible help.

 

[mechBgon]

Now, I know computers are amazing, but they don't run on air What power supply brand/model are you using there?

 

[Bacinator]

case: Aluminum-Black Xpider ATX PC Case
PS: 420 Watt TurboLink New ATX12V P4/AMD Thermal Controlled Power Supply
(http://www.xpcases.com/shop/item.asp?CatID=1&Sku=105)

Listed both because it is a package i got from xpcases.com.

Edit: Case/PS are 1 month old

 

[mechBgon]

Do you have any other power supplies you can test with, to make sure it isn't the PSU? Your 2 x 2 auxiliary power plug is plugged in, right?

Aside from that, the next thing you might try is to take out the PCI cards and see if it suddenly starts to behave, maybe unhook one of the optical drives too. That would reduce electrical load and also leave the PCI bus clear.

 

[Bacinator]

Unplugged every PC card, and no IDE device except 1 HDD.
The 2x2 (im assuming u mean square PS connecter near chip) is connected.

Same problem.

 

[mechBgon]

How about a round of Memtest86 to test for memory/northbridge problems, you can find it here. It will take a while to run. If it comes up dirty, try two modules instead of all four and see if you can narrow down which one(s) are flaky.

 

[Bacinator]

Mem has been running good for months, not very suspect...
Plus I cannot even get to the boot portion, so I don't know how im supposed to run "memtest86" on a system that will not complete post.

 

[mechBgon]

Hmm, well then you have an extra-simple memory test Try two modules at a time and if you can POST with some but not with others then you have an answer. Bottom line, this doesn't sound like anything money won't fix, and if you're tired of doing battle with it, here's your excuse to try out a newer board that uses Socket478 or SocketA. Or have a look at some S423 boards here, I see some Intel-branded ones and others... for under $50, even!

 

[Bacinator]

I'm curious as to why you believe its a mem error.

 

[Bacinator]

Found my blank C-Rimms, and tested the 4 sticks in pairs (Rambus has to be in pairs, staggered in the slots). Same problem with half the memory. Tried Crimm - Rrimm - Crimm - Rrimm, and Rrimm - Crimm - Rrimm - Crimm, with both pairs. Same results, bios will not complete post.

 

[mechBgon]

So it sounds like you're down to

• Motherboard
• CPU
• Power supply
• Video card
• Keyboard

I already suggested trying a different PSU. With just the bare-bones setup described above, it shouldn't take a whopper PSU to make it through the POST, so try that with whatever PSU you're using in your working system, perhaps?

 

[Bacinator]

Keyboard works.
Video card, works, plus swapped out with spare ATi 9500 pro
PSU works.
CPU has no visible damage (burn marks), and registers with BIOS. (plus would a bad cpu prevent post from completing?)
I think the BIOS is toasty on the motherboard, with no way to fix but RMA. Hopefully ECS won't let me down, and will respond to my call for help.

 

[Bacinator]

Still no worky. Current Status:

No PCI cards installed.
Swapped out ATi 9500 Pro, with GeForce2 MMX 400.
Swapped out and tested memory in different pairs (Rambus).
Unhooked all IDE devices, except one 40gb HDD (which is auto-detected during POST and during BIOS Setup).
Only PSU, CPU, 1HDD, 1FDD, 1 AGP Graphics card, and 1 pair of 128mb rambus currently installed.

Fault:
System powers on (normal)
Mem Test (normal)
IDE Scan (Normal)
Screen blanks and phase-shifts like when starting a game, and the comp changes video resolutions.
Cursor sits in upper left corner flashing like a prompt, but will not respond to key strokes (IE: ctrl-alt-del)

Any other idea's would be much appreciated.

 

[Bacinator]

Took hard drive off board's PCI bus.
Put drive into this working system.
System would not boot, even with this drive secondary.
Remove drive, got boot.ini, starting windows from C:\windows error.
system boots fine.
With other no-OS drives, BIOS passes hang point in POST.
Looks like i got me a bad HDD. Troubleshooting with maxtor powermax currently.

 

[Bacinator]

Woot. Fresh install of XP on the bad drive. Had to again reformat drive with max blast, using it on my PCI IDE bus, not the system IDE bus, because the system ide bus would hang. After reformatting again to FAT32, put drive on system bus, and installed xp, reformatting again to NTFS. Windows has started up, and is going through initial updates once again. All is well... For now. =) Hope my new shizzy (A7N8X Deluxe + xp2100) from Newegg shows up soon.

 

[mechBgon]

Have fun with the new goodies

 

[Bacinator]

I hope so, and thanks for your help.