Thursday, June 09, 2005

Story of no display

This is a new story.

The problem reported : No display

C0nfiguration : Celeron 1 GHz, on an intel 810e based Abit motherboard, 128 MB SD RAM, 20GB Seagate HDD, 52x Samsung CDROM Drive running Windows 98.

No visible faults were found on the motherboard. The power supply fan and the CPU fan were both working. No beep form the system to indicate the successful completion of POST and there is no disply. The HDD access indicator is on.

Naturally, the first suspect was the system memory. Just to rule out he possibility of any peripheral making a short on the system, removed all the connections except the motherboard power and the monitor and restarted the system.

No difference observed. Then removed the memory and restarted and looked for any error beeps from the speaker. There were no beeps. Not even the usual click sound.

Checked the memory and CPU on another similar system. Both are working fine. CHecked the monitor also for any possible problem. that is also working.

Now the two remaining suspects are the onboard display and the motherboard itself. As there is no error beeps for indication, it was not possible to find out the real problem. The only option left was to ask the customer to replace the motherboard.

Before telling him the same, I got an urge to just remove the battery powering CMOS as a last resort. Just took the battery out, cleaned, put it back and restarted the system.

Viola! It started working. After making the required changes in the set up, the system booted and worked fine without any problems?

I am not sure exatly why it happened. Can anybody explain?

2 comments:

viswaprabha വിശ്വപ്രഭ said...

That could be very simply a corrupted bitvalue in one of those bootstrap settings in CMOS!


It will be useful to know what exactly had happened just before the problem appeared! A power failure? An attempt to edit and save CMOS? A random play on keyboard while just re-booting the PC in a very peculiar sequence?

You may also check what happens when you try to change settings specifically on the Video Cache , address page(s). It may have setting where some values will make the PC not initialize!
(You can comeback by another Battery PullOut if u get stuck!)

മണി | maNi said...

I could not get any info on what happened before the problem appeared. The user doesn't know as usual. And that was the biggest problem.