JasonMel
09-13-2000, 07:39 PM
I moved into a new apartment recently, taking my nearly two-year-old homebuilt machine along. I plug it into my APC Back-UPS Office, and it runs fine for a while. Before long, though, it starts switching from battery to wall in a regular cycle: two seconds battery, two seconds wall, with the lights dimming in synch. Ten seconds or so of this was all it could take. One of the UPS sockets sparked (I couldn't tell which), and the machine went off.
In retrospect, this is about when my problems started. But I really suspect that the UPS malfunctioned, dimming the lights and frying my computer. The lights hadn't dimmed before, and they haven't dimmed since. I wonder if using it for a year in my previous pad, which had no ground circuitry or something according to the "wiring fault" light on the UPS, broke the UPS somehow.
Anyhow, I started getting random freezes shortly after. Sometimes the freezes happened before windows finished loading; sometimes they would happen as soon as I did anything in Windows, or in the middle of doing something; sometimes it would freeze after just being left alone for a while. I couldn't find a pattern.
I didn't do very much to troubleshoot this myself; all I remember doing was plugging straight into the wall, which didn't help. I gave the machine to a company in Tampa, and asked them to do diagnostics to confirm my (and their initial) suspicion that the mainboard was burnt.
They kept it a week, after which they charged $120 for what they claimed was five hours of work. (They said they were only charging for two of those five.) They didn't have an answer as to why it was doing what it was doing, but they reformatted the drive with my permission and put Windows ME on it. I probably should have insisted on a detailed account of what all they did for five hours, but they said they left it running overnight with no problems.
I got it home and poked around my new OS for a few minutes, with no freezes. I then decided to check my bios screen to see if they changed anything. Not seeing anything different, I changed my memory's data integrity mode from ECC, which I had set it to to try to fix the initial problems, back to EC-only, which I had been using the entire life of the system. A save-and-exit, and that was the last video signal I have gotten out of the machine.
Now it doesn't boot at all. I can hear the memory checking (or whatever that familiar brief noise is), and the drive spins up, and the case lights work, but the monitor light stays amber and there are no speaker sounds.
What do you think? Can I rule out anything listed in the Troubleshooting Expert as a possible cause of "no boot, and no clues?"
System specs:
Asus P2B-DS rev. 1.04 (440BX)
PII 450
128 MB CAS-2 ECC from Memory-Man
Cheetah 9LP 4.5 GB w/I-Storm
Matrox Mystique G200, 8 MB
Plextor UltraPleX 32X
SB AWE64 Gold
etc.
--
Jason Melancon
In retrospect, this is about when my problems started. But I really suspect that the UPS malfunctioned, dimming the lights and frying my computer. The lights hadn't dimmed before, and they haven't dimmed since. I wonder if using it for a year in my previous pad, which had no ground circuitry or something according to the "wiring fault" light on the UPS, broke the UPS somehow.
Anyhow, I started getting random freezes shortly after. Sometimes the freezes happened before windows finished loading; sometimes they would happen as soon as I did anything in Windows, or in the middle of doing something; sometimes it would freeze after just being left alone for a while. I couldn't find a pattern.
I didn't do very much to troubleshoot this myself; all I remember doing was plugging straight into the wall, which didn't help. I gave the machine to a company in Tampa, and asked them to do diagnostics to confirm my (and their initial) suspicion that the mainboard was burnt.
They kept it a week, after which they charged $120 for what they claimed was five hours of work. (They said they were only charging for two of those five.) They didn't have an answer as to why it was doing what it was doing, but they reformatted the drive with my permission and put Windows ME on it. I probably should have insisted on a detailed account of what all they did for five hours, but they said they left it running overnight with no problems.
I got it home and poked around my new OS for a few minutes, with no freezes. I then decided to check my bios screen to see if they changed anything. Not seeing anything different, I changed my memory's data integrity mode from ECC, which I had set it to to try to fix the initial problems, back to EC-only, which I had been using the entire life of the system. A save-and-exit, and that was the last video signal I have gotten out of the machine.
Now it doesn't boot at all. I can hear the memory checking (or whatever that familiar brief noise is), and the drive spins up, and the case lights work, but the monitor light stays amber and there are no speaker sounds.
What do you think? Can I rule out anything listed in the Troubleshooting Expert as a possible cause of "no boot, and no clues?"
System specs:
Asus P2B-DS rev. 1.04 (440BX)
PII 450
128 MB CAS-2 ECC from Memory-Man
Cheetah 9LP 4.5 GB w/I-Storm
Matrox Mystique G200, 8 MB
Plextor UltraPleX 32X
SB AWE64 Gold
etc.
--
Jason Melancon