The Tale of the Cursed Case... or?

[Boze]

So awhile back I built a new rig off the ASUS M2N-E motherboard with an XFX 7900GT, it was just a spare gaming rig, so I didn't throw a whole lotta money at it; picked up some OCZ DDR2 800 Special Ops 1G kits (2 gigs total) and threw that in there along with a 120 GB Seagate drive, the good ole NEC 3550A DVD-R/RW drive, a 500 watt Thermaltake power supply. Used onboard audio since it was a gaming rig for company and now its the current girlfriend's rig... and I'm having problems... and she can't play WOW... and that's going to lead to bigger problems (not just me not being able to use my rig, either).

All this worry occured when I attempted to use a floppy disk to upgrade the BIOS from revision 0103 to 0203 using the EZ Flash 2 utility on the motherboard. Well the system hung during the BIOS update (which I knew would most likely lead to fun of the technical support variety, and sure enough it did) so I turned off the machine, removed the floppy disk, and powered the system back up. Except it didn't POST. At all. Power light came on, and that was it... no beeps, no blips, no bloops,... nuth... eng... Not to be detered, I powered the system down, pulled out the motherboard battery, switched the real time system clock jumper in an effort to reset the board. Replace jumper to proper position, reinstall battery, turn on system... won't POST. At all. Again. At this point I assume the problem is with the motherboard and/or over my head. After playing phone tag between ASUS technical support departments, its determined that the chip onboard my M2N-E is fubar'ed and I'll need to have a new BIOS chip sent to me... no problems.

Unfortunately, I can't wait the week or so its going to take. I stroll down to CompUSA, picked up the M2N32-SLI Deluxe for $220, about $30 more than Newegg, but hey, its crunch time and weekend's coming up, that means the lady's gonna want two things, World of Warcraft and something else I won't discuss with you all... so $30 is worth it for both.

Come back home, go through the process of removing the M2N-E and installing the M2N32-SLI Deluxe. Finished up here about an hour ago and the same damn thing keeps happening... I power on the system and I get the same dang problem... system won't POST, won't do jack... the DVD-R/RW drive lights up as if self testing, then, kaput... nothing...

I thought it might be the video card, so I unattach the power cable to it, to see if that might be hanging the system. Negative.

I thought it might be the video card, so I remove it from the system completely and hope for some error code beeps... Negative.

I thought it could be the system hard disk and/or the data hard disk... so I detach them from the system one by one and a third time detach both... Negative.

I've exhaused my technical knowledge so far. I've tried everything I can think of... I thought it might be a short, but then I considered, if it is a short, why whould the system power on at all?

Please... help... I am at my wit's end about this.

 

[drjman]

I am guessing that you have unfortunately received a bad ASUS board. It may just be a coincidence, because i don't think anything else is the problem. Take the ASUS board back to COMPUsa (are there no other pc parts stores by you?!?!) and get another one. Tell em it won't post and you tested your other parts with another pc and they are all fine. I have had bad luck with ASUS boards and wouldn't recommend them. I am pretty sure a new board should fix the problem. If not...it doesn't sound like a short...nah, its gotta be the board.

 

[Boze]

Well it wasn't the board... it was the damn near everything. The Thermaltake power supply is not supplying power to the -5v. Two of the RAM chips are completely FUBAR'ed, and the XFX card is malfunctioning badly. My best friend is an Electrician's Mate 1st Class and I have another buddy who is an Electronics Technician 1st Class (Navy); both of whom came over to take a look - and we really delved deep too. To top it all off though, the ASUS motherboard in question, the M2N-E is just fine. Next step is to RMA all the non-functioning parts to the respective vendors.

Thanks for the ideas though drjman.

 

[Walshmobile]

hey new to forums and was looking on them earlier cause I had a similar problem of no post but would still power up. but it has turned out to be a short or something to that effect cause I replaced the mobo then memory and neither worked and I tried pulling the mobo out of the case and put it on a static bag and it booted up just fine.

edit: upon further testing it's not a short but actually the vid card has kicked the bucket, time to get it RMA'd

 

[Harvey]

It sounds like you may just have corrupted the BIOS, but not damaged the chip. Did you try to flash it again?

Are you sure you have the right version of the flash prog?

Even if you have the right one, did you try a fresh copy of the flash prog?