Re: intermittent failure to boot, award bios audio code is -..

On Mar 29, 2:31 pm, b_crowel...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I have a three year old homebrewed machine that I'm very happy with in
most ways, but it has intermittent problems booting. I think the
problem
developed within the last year, so maybe it indicates something has
been
damaged by a power surge or something...?

Most of the time it boots fine, but maybe one time out of three, it
fails with a -.. (long-short-short) audio code. If it fails once, then
typically it fails a bunch more times before getting out of its rut
and booting successfully. The bios is Phoenix-Award BIOS 6.00 PG,
and apparently -.. is "video adapter failure." The mobo is an ECS
L4VXA2, and the video card is a GeForce2. The power supply is a
pretty good quality Antec 380 W supply (80 PLUS), and the machine only
only draws a peak power of 169 W during booting, so I don't think that
should be the issue. (I recently upgraded from a cheap 300 W supply to
the more efficient 380 W supply, and it doesn't seem to have had any
effect on the problem.)

Am I right in interpreting this as a problem with the video card? If
so, is there anything I can do other than just replacing the video
card? I'm interested in keeping power consumption low, and don't do
any gaming, so I don't want to get the latest, greatest video card.
Actually, if I can't solve this problem, I'm thinking of building a
new, lower-power-consumption system with a mobo that has integrated
video.

TIA!

-Ben

Sounds like it's the mobo, my first suggestion would be to clear the
CMOS, and go from there. If it's doing "long-short-short" it doesn't
sound like it would be the memory. Could be processor or video. See if
you can find a video card that is cheap but will work. You can
generally find these for nearly $50 or lower. If you end you with a
new card and the system still doesn't work, you'll at least be one
part up on the new low power machine! ;)

Jeff

.

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