I am building 2 near identical machines for a test lab environment.

MSI K7N2G-ILSR motherboard; Seagate SATA HDD; Crucial PC2700 DDR RAM;

1 machine has Athlon XP 1800+ processor. Everything works perfectly.

1 machine has Duron 1GHz. Won't boot. POST indicates processor or memory problem.

Remedial action taken:
1. Swap out motherboard having tested RAM in other systems. No improvement.
2. Swap out processor for known good Athlon. No improvement.
3. Test suspect Duron processor in known good system. Good system now fails to boot
4. Replace suspect Duron processor. Test in both systems using brand new Duron. No boot

Conclusion: one system works under no circumstances. other system only works with Athlon XP CPU. Dud motherboard unlikely as replacement fails to work either.

I'm stumped. I'm sure there is someone cleverer out there.


:rolleyes:

What's happening in the BIOS when the Duron is in place? Is everything detected properly? Is the front side bus in sync with a Duron (ie, 100MHz) ? At what frequency is the BIOS registering the Duron and the memory?

It sounds as though any CPU (2 Durons) with a front side bus of 100MHz is refusing to boot. Therefore, if not a bad mobo or CPU, it must be an incorrect setting or detection in the BIOS.

Thanks for your reply.

It doesn't even get as far as the BIOS screen. The POST test reports a bad or incorrectly inserted CPU, but this happens even with the known good Athlon. All I get is a brief whirr from the disks as the machine powers up and a blank screen

I thought it might be the FSB; so I swapped out the RAM module for a PC2100 - not with much optimism I must say since I assume that the faster PC2700 stick would autodetect and run at 100Mhz in an operational Duron based system.

Are you getting any beep codes?

You get an onscreen error message and cannot enter the BIOS by pressing DEL?

Is the CPU fan spinning?

Have you checked the jumpers on the motherboard?

Here is a page (2-32) from the manual. Check that the J11 jumper is uncapped and set the J10 jumper to pins 2 and 3 capped (safe).

Malcore, you are the man!

I on the other hand am covered in shame, a simple RTFM mistake has cost me months of wasted time.

Many thanks for your help:)

Beautiful!

So it boots now? So much for so-called jumperless boards.

It's strange, the manual states on that page that the jumper default is set for 133/166, but on a prior page it states the BIOS is set at a default of 100.:confused:

Go figure. Never hurts to cover all bases. Twice!!

Glad it worked out.

Yup, the couple systems I built before really were jumperless, so I never noticed the jumper section in the manual. It would have helped I suppose to have had a reference to jumpers in the CPU install section of the manual. Anyway, next time I will be wiser, thanks again.