Dead motherboard Symptoms

Discussion in 'Processors, Motherboards & Memory' started by utulu, Aug 10, 2006.

  1. utulu

    utulu Newbie

    Model No of my microATX m/board is MSI P4MAM-L.

    Upon switching on the m/board, all what is displayed on the monitor is the CPU and RAM sizes. At the bottom of the screen it says the following: Please press DEL to enter setup.
    I pressed DEL but everyting is halted. Could this mean that the motherboard is damaged.

    Many thanks
     
  2. PsYkHoTiK

    PsYkHoTiK Admin nerd

    Might be something wrong with the BIOS.
     
  3. Echolac

    Echolac Newbie

    i suually encounter this problem during my OC..have to manuallly shut down then on it for few times to finally get into the bios..clear CMOS might help???:think: :think:
     
  4. TheApprentice

    TheApprentice Newbie

    Hi
    As nobody is biting on this one I thought I would throw my 2 penneth worth in here.

    this has happened to me twice now. First time it was the BIOS chip that had failed on me. The board refused to get past the "verifying dmi pool data" message. New board on that one.
    Second time around it was the cpu overheating.

    If you don't mind playing with the hardware, and you have some sort of speaker on the motherboard then try the following suggestions:

    Remove ALL of the pci cards, the ram modules and the mouse (yes, the mouse as well) and bare-boot the board. (If you are using a seperate graphics card then unplug that too for the moment.)

    If you have a speaker connected to the board then when you try and boot you will hear a long series of continuous beeps, which means that the board is trying to tell you that you have no ram installed. This is good because it means that the board's BIOS chip, AND the cpu are working just fine at this point.

    If you hear nothing then it's time to either try another cpu or to change the board. Game over...

    If you get past this point then switch off and plug the ram back in, and then try a re-boot. If you have more than one module then switch off and try each one seperately before booting. If the problem is the ram then this will soon show up.

    If you get to this point then you should hear a different set of beeps (usually one long and three short). this means the board is looking for a graphics card.

    Now switch off, plug in the graphics card (if it is off-board) and try booting again. If you get a hang-up this time then you have a graphics card problem.

    If all is ok at this point then you can turn off the pc, replace each pci card one-by-one and try booting every time you plug one in. If the problem is with one of the cards then this will soon show up.

    I suspect you may fall over at one of the first two options, which means either board or cpu.
     

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