Hi, Im new to this site, Wonderin if anyone can help me. Iv just recieved a pIII 500mhz computer from one of my dad's mates to replace my cyrix300. Only thing is it doesnt boot, I have put my hard drive set on master in it and its got a floppy that works fine. It also has a savage s3 agp card, and 128mb of ram. I get no video and it appears to start up-but doesnt sound like its booting. Iv tried using another video card and testing the monitor which is fine. Also i have removed the bios chip and made sure it was fine which it was-also found it was overheating. And i found this was due to the connections of the battery they werent touching so it overheated but i am sure its not damaged and is not overheating anymore.Can anyone shed any light on this matter? hopefully getting the manuals for it tonite so can check jumper settings, Please help me!!! LOL, Alex

I would start by having just the basics connected....hard drive, ram, processor and video card, also make sure all your connections to the board are good. If you can boot that way, then start adding the other components one by one. Another thing to check is your led's. Are they all in the right place? If they arent, you wont be able to boot either. Also, how old is the monitor? Believe it or not, sometimes older monitors wont work with newer systems.

Cheers for your reply TechGurl. I am just taking out the components now to leave the basics in. And will let you know how i get on. Also I had the monitor working with the system before when me and my dad got it to work last nite and when we changed over cd-rom drives it died and has been dead since then, hopefully getting manuals in about 10 mins, any other ideas?? Anyone??? Thanks, Alex

Stripped it down to the main basics and still no luck. Also obtained the manuals and found out the mainboard is a chaintech CT-6BTA3. I have checked all jumper settings are correct and cleared CMOS, also checked that connections to CMOS battery are correct. Am suspecting it maybe the bios chip? Am I right? Is there any way I can determine that it is dud? Someone out there please help me!!! Alex

OK, you swapped CD ROM and it died. Is the same CD ROM still attached?

Sounds like it's time to back up a bit. Try with only motherboard, CPU (and heatsink/fan), video card, memory and keyboard. Disconnect all other drives and cables. If you get video at that point, add the floppy drive and check it. Then add hard drive(s), then CD ROM. If it dies with the CD ROM again I would check to see if it might be a Panasonic interface CD ROM drive.

Panasonic/Sony/Mitsubishi interface drives have to be run from a controller on the sound card, not the IDE channel. When plugged into an IDE channel the machine will not boot at all. The most common ones are the Panasonic interface Mitsumi drives, CR 562 and CR 563 model numbers. You'll find the numbers on the yellow tag on the drive casing. Some of the Creative drives were also sound card controlled, Sony interface I think but not positive.

Cheers for your reply pete. I stripped it down so only ram, video card, keyboard were connected and had no luck there. It doesnt complete post, it just turns on and does nothing, makes no noises only lights one LED. Im really stuck now, i thought it might be the bios chip or sumfin, read on Chaintech's website (who make the mainboard) that by using a program you can fix corrupted data in the chip and you need to boot from floppy but how the hell can i do that when it doesnt boot properly????!?!?!?!, hope someone has some ideas, cheers guys, Alex

Ok, if will not POST with the minimal components then it is time to start checking those....

Try pulling all the RAM and then powering up...with no RAM you shold not POST, but pull an error...if the PC speaker is hooked up there should be a beep code.

If that happens then try to power on with either just one stick of RAM or different RAM.

Then if you can't determine if it was the RAM try it in another machine......

If the RAM checks out fine, try another video card...

If the video card checks out ok, the about the only thing left is the CPU itself.....which will need to be checked in a compatible motherboard (slot /socket/brand (amd/intel)).