Mobo won't post... no beeps UPDATE: boots, but win7 won't install. xp installs fine.

[Shawn]

Upgraded my inlaws HP desktop with and new mobo/cpu/ram combo. Took out the old motherboard, which is an MSI MS-7184 with AMD Athlon 64 x2 that they let me keep.

Brought it home and put it in the closet for a few weeks. Finally got a case for it and now it won't boot. I took the mobo back out and put it on the bench with nothing but the PSU and monitor connected.

Symptoms:
CPU fan turns on to full speed then slows down.
Monitor light turns green for about 10-15 sec then goes back into low power mode.
No beeps.


If I pull the ram sticks I do get long spaced out beeps so I know POST is occurring.

There are 4 sticks of ram and I have tried each one individually into each slot and still won't boot.

I also tried an old PCI video card and after a while (longer than before) I saw the light on the monitor turn green for a moment then it turns back to low power mode. Tried a different PSu and no luck as well.


Did I miss anything? I didn't put it in a static bag when I transported it because I didn't have one large enough with me, so maybe I killed it. Only other thing I can think is the caps on the motherboard went bad. I saw a replacement kit on ebay for $17 but don't want to waste the money if it's not the caps.

 

[paul878]

did you try clear the bios?

 

[Shawn]

Yes, first thing I did.

 

[Bubbaleone]

....Did I miss anything? I didn't put it in a static bag when I transported it because I didn't have one large enough with me, so maybe I killed it. Only other thing I can think is the caps on the motherboard went bad. I saw a replacement kit on ebay for $17 but don't want to waste the money if it's not the caps.

If it was my board I'd get a good magnifying glass, or a jewelers loupe, and very carefully examine the board for signs of burned circuit traces and/or components. If nothing visible pops out I'd suspect a corrupt BIOS considering you don't hear any beep code with RAM installed.

 

[Shawn]

Fixed the problem. Apparently the cable wasn't firmly attached to the monitor. It didn't make a beep because it was giving me an error that the system fan was not attached.


I do have a new problem though... can't get windows 7 to install at all. It gets a random BSOD when it's copying files. I did memtest on all 4 sticks and all 4 passed. Tried installing with only 1 stick in and no luck.

Frustrated I tried to install XP and works fine. No BSODs at all.

 

[Shawn]

Can't get Vista to install either. I think that maybe the caps on the mobo are going bad, but I don't know why XP works with no BSODs.

 

[Bubbaleone]

While you've got the XP installation CD handy, run setup again. When the text setup finishes select the "R" (Repair Windows using the Recovery Console) option. Run: chkdsk C: /p /r

If their are bad sectors causing the issues with Vista and 7 this will fix it. In my experience XP is more tolerant of minor disk errors than either Vista or 7. You could also run diskpart from the console, delete all partitions, then format the raw disk which will also fix any bad sectors.

 

[bononos]

......

If their are bad sectors causing the issues with Vista and 7 this will fix it. In my experience XP is more tolerant of minor disk errors than either Vista or 7. You could also run diskpart from the console, delete all partitions, then format the raw disk which will also fix any bad sectors.

Do you know exactly why its more tolerant? I suspect that XP/2000 would wait longer for disk read/writes or make more retries than Vista/W7, I had a problem disk which would install XP with a pause in the middle but would just bail on W7.

 

[Shawn]

I'll give it a shot. Been getting Page Fault in Nonpage area and stop 0x50 which seems strange for a hard drive issue.

 

[Shawn]

I used diskpart in winxp setup to create a partition then did a full format. Went to install 7 and selected the preformatted partition but still got a BSOD when it got to expanding files.

This time is says IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

STOP: 0x0000000A (0xFFFFFA82FFE5DDD88, 0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000, 0xFFFFF8000F278897)

 

[Shawn]

Figured it out. Before I tried installing windows I updated the bios from an HP bios to an MSI bios (board is made by MSI) to get more settings and get rid of the HP branding. Flashed it back to the HP bios and W7 installed fine.

Don't know what was different between XP and 7 that allowed XP to work fine and 7 to crash. Guess the bios wasn't 100% compatible with this board. The bios was from a nearly identical non-oem board, but the OEM board was missing some things (like 2 extra SATA ports and TV out). Guess the W7 setup was trying to access them or something.

 

[VirtualLarry]

probably some of the ACPI tables were wrong then. Just a guess.