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I have a problem in starting my PC I put together.

D

daljaxon

Junior Member
Hi,

About 3 months ago, I was given a motherboard.

PWA-PWA-Camaro MotherBoard
PCB-TWA-Camaro MotherBoard
5114VU
A Compaq board
I installed a K6-2 550MHz processor
and 64Mb of memory
floppy, harddrive, and cdrom

When starting up the pc, the only screen that is shown is the red word compaq on the screen with the blinking cursor on the upper left of the screen.

I was wondering what is wrong here. Could it be a bad board, and/or bad ram, and/or bad processor, or just a setting that I may have missed? Could there be too many problems that might cause this? I was just wondering if the bios might be corrupted or if the memory isn't working could this prevent a place for the bios to work on? Then again I thought the virtual memory contained on the motherboard is where the bios is suppose to work from.

I'm pretty new at this an would like to learn where and what I need to check to sort this problem out.

Thanks,
daljaxon

 
The first thing you need to determine is whether or not it is locking up, or not booting. See if you can get into the bios, on the compaq's I think it is one of the F-keys. If it wont let you into bios, remove the cdrom and the hard drive cables and any extra pci cards and try again. A dead or misjumpered drive can cause that type of behavior.
 
I would also definitely clear the cmos. If that doesn't help, unhook the cdrom, any pci devices (besides vga if it is pci), hard drives, floppy...everything but the ram, processor and video card. See if it gets to the point where it says "no OS found" or something.

if that doesn't work, try swapping out ram (could be failing at memory test). Other than that, it would seem like a mobo problem to me.
 
Thanks for all your advice. When the pc starts, I don't recieve the bios at all, just the compaq screen. I pulled the drives and devices off and still have the same result. I will pull the cables and replace the processor and memory card and check that. I'll triple check my jumpers and then clear the bios to make sure.

Thanks,
daljaxon

Using PC's too old to mention
 
Go fry's and get a cheap mobo cpu combo. Faster and easier then spending hours trying to figure out what's wrong with your system. Extra cost of ram and case but it's better then spending all day and night working on old stuff.
 
Your not going to "recieve" the bios, you must manually enter the bios by pressing F10, or F2, or whatever key compaq uses to enter the bios.
 
I agree with johnjkr1
I think it might be F10 while the little symbol is displaying in the upper right corner
(or the upper left corner).
 
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