NBK said:
Hi
I have an ASUS P4B533-E, Leadtek GeForce 3 Ti-200, Audigy 1, Maxtor 40Gb
HDD, FDD and Samsung DVD/CD-RW.
Everytime i try to boot some of the POST info becomes garbled with
strange characters. I will not boot from a Linux or Windows XP CD. It
just hangs.
I have reset the CMOS to no avail. Checked all connections. Do i need
to RMA it or is there something i overlooked.
Thanks
NBK
Just about anything could be busted.
It could be a bad power supply (a weak rail). If the POST screens
become garbled consistently each time, then that probably isn't the
problem, as a power problem would make for more random corruption.
It could be a bad BIOS flash chip. Some of them get "bit rot",
where some of the bits in the flash chip get corrupted. Reflashing
the BIOS would fix it, but of course that depends on whether the
POST sequence lasts long enough for you to boot DOS from a floppy.
Alternately, you could get a replacement flash chip from badflash.com
or from Asus.
It might be bad memory, depending on how far into the POST sequence
it gets.
You may need to simplify your configuration and unplug anything
you don't need, to get it started. Reduce yourself to one stick
of ram, maybe a floppy drive for running memtest86 or flashing the
BIOS. Although the symptoms don't really point at the video card,
try another one if you've got one (I'm assuming the processor
renders characters into the frame buffer, and the video card
doesn't actually do that itself. Not really sure if, while in
the BIOS, the video card is considered to be just a bit map for
the processor to draw into or not.)
Paul
