Boot failure help needed

[jude]

I have a home-built computer that I put together a couple years ago
which has suddenly pooped itself. On start-up, the system only gives a
long beep followed by a pause and then the long beep and so on. It does
not load Windows. My system specs are:

Windows XP Pro w/ SR1
1.4 GHZ AMD Thunderbird CPU
ABIT AT7-MAX2 motherboard
768 MB CRUCIAL DDR PC2100 RAM
ATI RADEON 9600 XT AGP 8x/4x Graphics card
WESTERN DIGITAL 120GB ATA 100 7200 rpm hard drive
WESTERN DIGITAL 60GB ATA 100 7200 rpm hard drive
PLEXTOR PlexWriter 24x10x40 E-IDE (ATAPI) CD-RW drive
CENDYNE DVD ROM drive
1.44MB SONY floppy drive
CREATIVE audio PCI sound card

Any thoughts on the most likely cause of the problem? Any asistance is
much appreciated!

 

[Bob Knowlden]

The AT7 has an Award BIOS, so I suggest a Google search on Award BIOS post
codes.

A single beep, repeating, is supposed to be due to a memory error. You could
try seeing whether your DIMMs are seated properly. (What do you have: 3 x
256MB or 256 MB+ 512 MB?) If that's not the problem, you could try booting
with one DIMM at a time to see if you can identify a failed one.

Good luck.

Address scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.

 

[Tony Hill]

I have a home-built computer that I put together a couple years ago
which has suddenly pooped itself. On start-up, the system only gives a
long beep followed by a pause and then the long beep and so on. It does
not load Windows. My system specs are:

Windows XP Pro w/ SR1
1.4 GHZ AMD Thunderbird CPU
ABIT AT7-MAX2 motherboard
768 MB CRUCIAL DDR PC2100 RAM
ATI RADEON 9600 XT AGP 8x/4x Graphics card
WESTERN DIGITAL 120GB ATA 100 7200 rpm hard drive
WESTERN DIGITAL 60GB ATA 100 7200 rpm hard drive
PLEXTOR PlexWriter 24x10x40 E-IDE (ATAPI) CD-RW drive
CENDYNE DVD ROM drive
1.44MB SONY floppy drive
CREATIVE audio PCI sound card

Any thoughts on the most likely cause of the problem? Any asistance is
much appreciated!

Not knowing the beep codes of that board, I couldn't say for sure, but
what I would suggest is to start by stripping the system down. Try
booting with ONLY the processor, motherboard and power supply. At the
very least that might give you a different error code saying "there's
no memory installed". Then try it with a single stick of memory
(actually try each of the sticks separately). If the system were
working normally than this should POST, though you won't see much
without a video card in the system. Then slowly build up from there,
one component at a time until it fails.

Of course, my personally guess is that it'll be a bad motherboard.
That board came out in the era of bad capacitors, see
http://www.badcaps.com/ for a bit more info on this problem. LOTS of
motherboards failed due to this problem, most with the sort of
symptoms you're describing. Check the capacitors for signs of damage.