BIOS Hangs - Bad Motherboard?

[rckowal]

My son installed a (apparently) bad memory chip which may have (I wonder) nuked the MB in what was a good working PC. The chip got hot & was accompanied by a hot electrical circuit smell (but no smoke was seen). He removed the bad chip & replaced it with a known good one. Now, on power up; it boots DIRECTLY into the BIOS and hangs there. (Yes, the BIOS. This without clicking on the setup key to access it). PC gives one long beep (which on this Award BIOS is supposedly a memory problem). If I click to save BIOS settings and boot into Windows, it goes to a solid black screen &/or reboots back into the BIOS again. This repeats every time it's powered up.

The BIOS shows HD & RAM are being recognized. The hard drive was spinning but there's no light or life on the floppy drive. Have removed MB & carefully inspected wires, connections, circuit board, etc. & there is no visible sign of any kind of damage. Tried disconnecting &/or removing drives & cards down to the bare MB (The video card is built into MB). Even stripped down, it still does the same - boots directly into the BIOS.

I've ordered a new MB ($200 plus) but now I wonder if I jumped too quickly before doing more trouble shooting. What do you think is wrong here? Your help will be very much appreciated.

[deddard]

Try changing the boot sequence. the black screen (I'm assuming you are using xp/nt/2000) is where the OS choice menu would appear if you had a multiple boot system.
I'm having a similar problem myself (but for different reasons) and my system hangs at the black screen if the HDD is the first boot option.
If the system is set to cd-hdd in that order, whether or not there is a disk int he cd, the system boots fine.
do you know what motherboard you have? I'm using a Gigabyte 71EXH.

[ErnieK]

Check to see if the key is stuck on keyboard.
I learned this the hard way. Took me over two hrs to figure this one out on a computer

[rckowal]

Hi Deddard, Thanks for getting back to me, it's appreciated.

The motherboard is an ASUSTek P4S-LA REV 1.XX with Award Software BIOS. It came in an HP Pavilion 740n (P4/1.6 CPU).

At the moment, I can't do anything with the BIOS because it quit opening altogether. Although the boards powered up (fans spin, etc.) all I get is an unlit screen on the monitor now - allmost like no video output. But, before it quit I recall the boot sequence was floppy, then HDD. CD/DVD drives were disconnected at the time.

Just before this happened I reset the BIOS default and disabled the "Quick Boot" (to get a slower POST). In the interim, on three occassions, the screen opened with a "Memory" test, which only showed about 32mb of the 256mb chip that's in there. It hung there so I couldn't get out of that screen at all. Now it doesn't open at all.

Just took the battery out to see if will reset the BIOS. Any other ideas?

[rckowal]

ErnieK, Thanks for the idea.

Actually, it does the same thing even if there is no keyboard installed.
I also tested with a second keyboard. Makes no difference.

[Sylvander]

Try the boot troubleshooter from about here
http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/boot/walk/bios1.htm

Or go back to the beginning
http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/boot/walk/index.htm

[BigBlue66]

Sounds to me like the DIMM slot is toasted. I assume you have tried the known good working memory is each available DIMM slot?

[rckowal]

Thanks for the reply Big Blue. I tried that but it didn't make any difference. In the meantime, had a local repair shop check it. They confirmed that the motherboard had definitely died.

Sending it off to HP for repair. They will replace anything & everything that is required to make the PC work properly. Includes processor, hard drive, mother board, whatever - for a flat $249 charge which includes round trip shipping & a shipping carton sent to your home. A replacement mother board by itself costs $190 plus $15 shipping & tax. No local repair shop can touch that. I found the shops send HP's back home to have them repaired.