Failed Asus motherboard

[Sean Fleming]

My P4S8X mobo failed while I was in Internet Explorer. I lost the
signal to the monitor, and just as this happened, I heard the bios
voice message about some type of system failure, but I don't know what
the complete message was. The computer would not respond to
ctrl-alt-del. I had to power-down by holding in the power button.

After turning power back on, I noticed the following:
1) Still no signal to monitor; So I turned it on manually;
2) the red light under the power button came on for a few seconds, but
there was no typical "beep" that you normally hear after turning power
on.
3) No memory check, in fact, nothing appearing on display at all;
4) Cannot enter bios;
5) and the boot sequence would not initiate, although power was
present.


Perhaps some of you with more experience can advise me whether this
could have been done by a virus (didn't have AV software installed;I
suppose a virus could erase CMOS coding), or whether it's a bad mobo.

Finally, if it could be a virus, how would I check/clean the contents
of the hard drive without damaging another computer?

Thanks,
Sean

 

[Wheat Muncher]

Sean Fleming Babbled on and on and on about:

My P4S8X mobo failed while I was in Internet Explorer. I lost the
signal to the monitor, and just as this happened, I heard the bios
voice message about some type of system failure, but I don't know what
the complete message was. The computer would not respond to
ctrl-alt-del. I had to power-down by holding in the power button.

After turning power back on, I noticed the following:
1) Still no signal to monitor; So I turned it on manually;
2) the red light under the power button came on for a few seconds, but
there was no typical "beep" that you normally hear after turning power
on.
3) No memory check, in fact, nothing appearing on display at all;
4) Cannot enter bios;
5) and the boot sequence would not initiate, although power was
present.


Perhaps some of you with more experience can advise me whether this
could have been done by a virus (didn't have AV software installed;I
suppose a virus could erase CMOS coding), or whether it's a bad mobo.

Finally, if it could be a virus, how would I check/clean the contents
of the hard drive without damaging another computer?

Thanks,
Sean

There are virii out there that will supposedly erase BIOS settings (go to
symantec and look at some of the variations of Magistr) but I have never
heard of them actually working correctly, so I think it is safe to assume
that it was not caused by a virus, but rather a hardware failure. Check
your vid card, make sure it's seated, check in another system as well,
along with RAM etc. Unplug all drives and peripherals one at a time until
(if ever) it posts. If it doesn't- assume motherboard failure, because
CPU's go down so very rarely. VERY IMPORTANT to check for a faulty power
supply too.
IMO- from my expereince with ASUS boards- I would just ship the damn
thing back. They are an over-rated piece of junk- no offence meant. I RMA
more ASUS boards than all others combined. I remember the good old days,
when you couldn't trust anything BUT an ASUS board. Guess those days are
gone.
Go with a Gigabyte or MSI, you won't be dissappointed.
Side note... if you are still worried about it being a virus on your
harddrive you can do one of three things:
1. Attach it (hard drive) to another system as a slave and scan it. This
will get any of the executable files, as well as infected files, but will
not fix any registry entries etc. You will have to do that by hand after.
2. Fdisk. Use the command fdisk /mbr first to destroy the master boot
record, then do a standard Fdisk just to be sure. This will get rid of
those pesky boot sector virii. Upon completion of Fdisk, format
shamelessly.
3. Do a total kill of your disk (don't confuse this with a low level
format) using a proprietary (or third person) zero write utility. Use the
proprietary before anything else. Be warned that there is no hope of
recovering anything once you do this, so back up your files to another
machine if you need them (Don't say I didn't warn you ;-)).