Is there a doctor in da House!

[Mot73]

Ok, Here's the deal doc......Pc won't boot up. Turns on, I hear the drive spinning, even sounds as though its booted fully, but the monitor will never "engage" in to the mix.

My toubleshooting provided the following. Took pc to work, pulled Vid card, (X850 XT 2 weeks old) and popped it into my work pc. Booted up like a champ!

Took the vid card from the work pc slapped it into my home system...same senerio, monitor won't kick on altough the "normal" booting sounds emit from the case.

My monitor, crt, worked on my work box so it seems ok.

I'm thinking MOBO.?.?

Thoughts?

If you concur, I'm running a MSI 865PE, P4 3.0 G, 1 gig corsair 3200 mem, WB SATA HD 80Gig, Radeon X850 XT 256MB, Soundblaster Audigy 2. XP Home.

Recommendations for a replacement MOBO?

Thanks
Tom

[Trooper]

i concur. Sounds like you dont need a doctor.

One last thing you could try to confirm the motherboard being burnt, unplug all drives from it and keep the card in and try to boot.

[Apophis]

My first reaction would be to pull the CMOS battery off the motherboard, remove all power to the machine, and move the CMOS reset jumper for 10-15 seconds and then put it all back to normal and boot it back up. That may resolve the problem.

I've got a very similar system, but I'm running the ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe board and it has performed quite well for me! P4 3.4, 2GB PC3200, 2x 80GB SATA, 2x 80GB EIDE, 1x 120GB EIDE, X850XT but no Soundblaster.

[Mot73]

Originally Posted by Apophis

My first reaction would be to pull the CMOS battery off the motherboard, remove all power to the machine, and move the CMOS reset jumper for 10-15 seconds and then put it all back to normal and boot it back up. That may resolve the problem.

I've got a very similar system, but I'm running the ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe board and it has performed quite well for me! P4 3.4, 2GB PC3200, 2x 80GB SATA, 2x 80GB EIDE, 1x 120GB EIDE, X850XT but no Soundblaster.

what do you mean by "remove all power from the machine?" I did try resetting the CMOS by removing the jumper and putting it down on the other 2 pins..isn't that what you're supposed to do?

[Mot73]

No better results by pulling Cmos Battery and cmos jumper.

I unplugged the power from the PS to the mobo and to the cpu and reset them as well.

Same results.

[Stormin_Norman1]

Originally Posted by Mot73

Ok, Here's the deal doc......Pc won't boot up. Turns on, I hear the drive spinning, even sounds as though its booted fully, but the monitor will never "engage" in to the mix.

My toubleshooting provided the following. Took pc to work, pulled Vid card, (X850 XT 2 weeks old) and popped it into my work pc. Booted up like a champ!

Took the vid card from the work pc slapped it into my home system...same senerio, monitor won't kick on altough the "normal" booting sounds emit from the case.

My monitor, crt, worked on my work box so it seems ok.

I'm thinking MOBO.?.?

Thoughts?

If you concur, I'm running a MSI 865PE, P4 3.0 G, 1 gig corsair 3200 mem, WB SATA HD 80Gig, Radeon X850 XT 256MB, Soundblaster Audigy 2. XP Home.

Recommendations for a replacement MOBO?

Thanks
Tom

Make sure the monitor wire is plugged in and not stretched. Sometimes that happens to me and I need to push the wire up a little to the monitor.

[Apophis]

Originally Posted by Mot73

No better results by pulling Cmos Battery and cmos jumper.

I unplugged the power from the PS to the mobo and to the cpu and reset them as well.

Same results.

You covered all the bases here. So I would wager you'll be looking at a new motherboard.

[Mot73]

Originally Posted by Apophis

You covered all the bases here. So I would wager you'll be looking at a new motherboard.

I know the "recommended" path is a fresh windows install, but frankly, I don't have access to another computer with SATA to be able to backup my HD, can I still get up and running after a MOBO replacement without reformatting?

[Mot73]

arighty...went with the Asus P4P800-E Deluxe.

"taps fingers waiting on NewEgg".

[Apophis]

Originally Posted by Mot73

I know the "recommended" path is a fresh windows install, but frankly, I don't have access to another computer with SATA to be able to backup my HD, can I still get up and running after a MOBO replacement without reformatting?

You'll get mixed responses on this one. All I can do is share my experiences with hardware replacements and Windows XP.

I used to run AMD hardware on my home machine, I had an Athlon XP 2800+ on an MSI motherboard with the nForce2 chipset. After having problem after problem with my AMD hardware over the years (well, more appropriately with various software applications not working properly or crashing randomly) I decided to switch over to Intel. I bought a 2.4GHz P4 and an ASUS P4P something-or-other motherboard and some new memory. I backed up my critical files and then did the hardware switch. After booting up XP, I installed the new motherboard drivers and rebooted again. When my machine came up the second time all the hardware was identified and everything ran like a charm. I ran my machine without a re-install for a year until I had a drive failure (Damn Maxtor).

I'm not sure if the starts were just aligned for me that day or not, but I did a complete hardware switch without any problems at all. This may work for you as well.

One option would be to pick up a cheap drive, even if it's EIDE, and copy all your important files to that drive before the hardware switch. Or just get a new drive to use as your boot drive and do a clean install of XP there and then copy your stuff off your old boot drive and use the old boot drive as extra storage space.

[en4rcment]

Less than a month of gaming and Mot already fried his mobo?


I would highly recommend that you do a fresh install. With a new (different type even) mobo things will be shaky with a different bios running everything...

It would be risky even if you were replacing the exact same type of mobo...

[troublesome4u]

Before you buy a new MB try a different graphic card and vga or dvi cable.

[Mot73]

I did a MOBO replacement on a friends computer a couple weeks back and it booted up like a champ. Went from MSI to Gigabyte. I was pleasantly surprised.

I guess I'll see what happened. I bought a serial card for my work PC so I backed up my data onto my work network so no worries in losing stuff, just a pain to do all the windows update crap if I start from a fresh install, not to mention the video drivers, directX, reinstall all the games my son has, windows and office verifications crap....its all just a pain in the a$$.

[Mot73]

Originally Posted by troublesome4u

Before you buy a new MB try a different graphic card and vga or dvi cable.

If you read up there, I did all that trouble shooting. I'm pretty confident its the MOBO.

[Spyder]

Yeah, sounds like you're pretty much got it figured. As to needing a fresh install with XP it's a bit of a crapshoot. Sometimes it won't care that you've switched parts on it, and sometimes it will care very, very hard. As in a BSOD that pops up on system start that will not go away. At any rate, the worst case scenario is that you'll just have to reinstall XP.