Lanparty NF2 - can't eliminate the led condition

[bobwilson007]

Here's the background - this was running great and I added some corsair 3200 ram along with one stick of the older ram. It booted great, but after a few minutes rebooted and on restart said cmos battery was dead.

I have replaced the cmos battery, cleared the cmos many times, gone back to the previous ram and had no luck getting it to post or get past the 4 led point. All the fans start including case, cpu, and video.

I hope someone can show me what I'm missing here.

Thanks for any help,
Bob

 

[mikemcc]

With these NF2 DFI motherboards, you often have to do a long CMOS clear. I know it doesn't seem to make much sense, but it is very often the only thing that works. You have to jump the CMOS clear pins, then unplug the PS from the wall. Then you have to take out the battery. Then press and hold the power on/off switch for about 10 seconds to help drain the capacitors. Then you have to leave it sit for at least an hour. Then plug everything back in in the reverse order and try to bootup.

If that doesn't work, you have to do the same thing but leave it sit for 24 hours. I'm assuming this is a LP NF2 Rev B, but it won't matter if it is an earlier version. These sista motherboards are excellent boards, and people will still pay good money for them. But they are also *very* prone to BIOS chip corruption. It may be that you need to reflash your BIOS chip, but you need a good one to do it -- or at least a machine that is compatible with that chip so you can reflash it. There still may be places where you can buy these -- probably available on e-Bay. Or DFI will probably reflash it for you for a very nominal charge or even just for shipping charges. BTW, if the 24 hour clear doesn't work, I'd reflash the BIOS chip or get a new one -- the 4 LED symptom leads me to believe this is likely.

One other trick when memory caused the original problem is to try to boot with a single 256K stick if you have one of those lying about. This often works in conjunction with the 24 hour CMOS clear when nothing else will work.

Those who spent a lot of time overclocking these sistas will likely confirm everything I have said here, even though some of it sounds a bit odd, because they have had to do all of these things a thousand times.

 

[bobwilson007]

Hey mikemcc,

Thanks for the help. I've tried some of that stuff, but not exactly as you mentioned so I'll do that. I don't think I have a 256 around, but I'll check. I know I have a 512.

And I'll check into reflashing the bios chip. From the complete lack of response from this board so far, this may be what I have to do.

Thanks again,
Bob

 

[mikemcc]

Hi Bob,

This forum is usually really helpful, but those sistas are getting a bit long in the tooth and most folks moved past them years ago. That's probably why you aren't getting a lot of response here. Don't get me wrong, while those boards are older, they are good ones. They are lots of fun to overclock and they seem to last forever, except the constant BIOS corruption gets to be a pain in the butt. I've still got one of these going with an old AMD Thunderbird, I think, that my daughter uses. It's mostly for playing games and browsing the web (she's only 7), but it's still going strong.

I don't know if the 256K trick will work with a 512 stick. I think I remember folks trying that and it didn't work the same way. But it's worth a shot if you don't have a 256 lying around or you don't have a friend you can borrow one from.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Hmmm? I had the LanPaty nfII Ultra, the one that came with the huge shipping carton, and a harness for carrying a mid-tower around. I had an XP-M 2600 in it, and never did anything exotic with it, but it seemed to gradually end up with corrupted files on its hard drives, then one day it couldn't FIND any of its PATA drives. I didn't show it any SATA drives, as it never had any of those. I just set the thing aside, pulled the RAM and CPU, and considered it to have died from some early electronic part's demise.

Maybe I should've invested more time, but I also had an Asus A7N8X that never gave me a single instant of trouble, and it's the last surviving NF2 system I have, when at one time here there were four (I'm using that old darling as I write, and it's had the same XP-3000 (400 MHz FSB version), and same single GB of Kingston RAM, the past three years, although it's had three different VGAs in it).

 

[bobwilson007]

I think the difference in your experience and mine is mine happened suddenly after an upgrade attempt. I'm in the midst of a long cmos reset right now and we'll see how that goes. I think it's gonna need a new chip though. Or a reflash. That's my opinion.

When I first got the board I had to work with this LED thing and got it running stable. With the lack of response from any reset attempts to this point, I'm not optimistic about the cmos reset, but I'll certainly try it first.

I appreciate all the tips and info sharing.