Can't get into bios?

[88carrera]

(As you can see this is an older gaming computer I still use to run older simulations that won't work with Vista and store pictures so I may not boot up for a month or two at times.)

I went to boot it a few days ago and the familiar sound of hard drives spinning up following by a clicking sound from the drives. Spin up, click, spin up, click. The screen was dark and it never made it to memory test.

I thought maybe the PSU died so I switched it out with another pc. It did boot this time to show processor and memory test pass then it just stays there. At the bottom it says press DEL for setup, or Alt-F2 for flash utility-I DEL and nothing happens.

A few times after reset sometimes it might say detecting IDE drives but nothing happens.

I cleared the CMOS-no change

I swapped the CMOS battery and cleared CMOS again-no change.

I pulled out one memory stick and rebooted-no change

I pulled out the other memory stick and rebooted-no change

I swapped the slots and rebooted-no change

I unplugged all devices except for the video card and hard drives-no change

I unplugged my ps/2 keyboard and tried a usb keyboard-no change

Could the old psu maybe fried the bios chips on start up? I didn't smell anything like burning on start up.

Since my drives are setup in RAID could it be that? I don't know much about RAID but I assume a RAID issue would not prevent me from entering bios?



Howard
Maryland, USA
-----------------------

Asus A7N8X Deluxe
AMD Athlon XP 1250MHz
ATI 9800
1MB memory
RAID

 

[d3fct]

Since my drives are setup in RAID could it be that? I don't know much about RAID but I assume a RAID issue would not prevent me from entering bios?

I wouldnt think so i messed up my raid 0 array before and it would try to boot, and get to the screen where it tells you what hdd are there it would error and tell me my raid array was unbootable, and was completely able to reach my bios. I even plugged in another hd with xp on it to try and recover files from my damaged raid.

 

[2wicked]

Maybe a bad hard drive disconnect one (or both) and see if it goes past the boot post screen.The spin click noise sounds like a drive failing to initialize (start up) causing the bios to freeze when searching for drives.

 

[88carrera]

Maybe a bad hard drive disconnect one (or both) and see if it goes past the boot post screen.The spin click noise sounds like a drive failing to initialize (start up) causing the bios to freeze when searching for drives.

I disconnected all the drives and just left the video card on the psu. It will stay on the Asus logo screen, where I can press tab to show POST. If I press DEL-no response.

I thought maybe flashing the bios would help. I an running 1007 and can go up to 1008 so I put that on a floppy with an reattached the floppy drive. It will respond to Alt-F2 and I hear the floppy read and it says please wait but then nothing else happens.

At this point I'm thinking my bios chips are fried. I went on Ebay to see if I could find a used cheap A7N8X board for sale when i saw some vendors selling just the chips for $5-$6.

 

[88carrera]

Motherboard is fried

Well guys while looking around in the motherboard i saw these capacitors--as you can see several are bulging and many leaked. I'm guessing this has been building over time and it finally died the last time I tried to power up the system.

I have two choices now:

1. Buy the same board off Ebay so I can transfer my data on the hard drives to me new system.

2. Somehow transfer the data on the drives (RAID) to another pc.

I have three drives on the old machine and I don't know which two are in raid array.

 

[2wicked]

I'm glad it wasn't the hard drives (data loss sucks).
If you have a steady hand and a soldering iron you could replace the caps.

 

[88carrera]

I'm going to try replacing the caps with new ones from http://www.badcaps.net

 

[d3fct]

good luck, hopefully no dataloss occured, my data loss was irecoverable lost couple hundred gigs of music games n movies.