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?

Incidentally and additionally I updated the drivers this week; if that could
have anything to do with it-? I updated the graphics card driver from nVidia
site; got the latest from ViaArena for the chipset and IDE/SATA devices, and
updated the Realtek High-Definition Audio driver and the Realtek Gigabit
Family Ethernet NIC driver: All the correct versions - some less than a
month old: I very much doubt that this has anything to do with the problem;
but I thought it worth mentioning anyway.

(I noticed that Driver Agent was giving me all the wrong drivers: I didn't
install any as I smelt a rat from the start; so I went and got the right
drivers manually from the manufacturer's site.)




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