Re: Dead PC - Won't POST

Dr.Hal0nf1r£$ wrote:
My main PC mysteriously terminally BSOD'd and won't POST any more;
just a flashing hyphen in the top left corner of the screen; as if
the BIOS chip has crashed and burned. It's the INXPense with the
Athlon 64x2 4000+ CPU, 2GB Kingston DDR2 667MHz, and Seagate 160GB
HDD with 2MB buffer.
(I'm suddenly overjoyed that I've become a backup-aholic of late.)

What immediately springs to mind is that the BIOS always gave a
warning notice at POST

"Warning: CPU architecture not recognised; press F1 to proceed
anyway" Or similar.

- I know; that board is only supposed to take up to and including
3800+, but it worked happily with a 4000+ until now, (Mine is the
only such PC that has anything more than the intended 3800+ or less,
no customers have been done.) It's been behaving rather strangely
lately; and has had a few BSODs which I thought I'd sorted out.

So I take it I've burnt out the BIOS; that's what appears to have
happened anyway; both from the no-POST state now, as well as from
seemingly overdriving it with the wrong CPU since I built it. I
didn't have any other dual-core CPUs at the time of construction, and
someone had asked whether it would be terminal if anything more than
a 3800+ was fitted.
If the fault's as I assume above then I've only got myself to blame;
but if it's otherwise I'm baffled. Does anyone have any thoughts on
the matter before I disassemble the dead machine and attempt some
kind of post-mortem if I have time?

Addendum: I switch on; all fans spin (3), HD light is constantly on, PC
speaker beeps once as normal, (Which suddenly leads me to think it might not
be the BIOS now - ?)DVD-RAM spins up and self-checks as usual, but no
visible POST, and just a flashing white hyphen top left of screen. HD light
still constantly on all the time - And so it stays in that state. Holding
the power button in eventually switches it off as usual. It seems the mobo
is functioning virtually normally... This gets more baffling as time goes
by: I'm going to sleep on it though, (Not on the computer itself; you know
what I mean :-) ) before it's time to get up again.


.

Quantcast