I screwed up (I think)...help!

[Garobill]

I am building an ASUS A7N8X, Athlon 2100, 1 gb of Kingston ram. Everything seemed to be ok and system worked ok on power up, but I had overlooked changing the SATA jumper to bypass this particular system. Being the neat soul that I am, I went into the board to take care of this, but inadvertantly moved the CMOS jumper to the "clear" position instead of moving the SATA jumper. Upon power up with the CMOS jumper in the "clear" position, of course nothing worked. So, ukpon investigation, I discovered what I had done. I then did a "by the book" CMOS clear, and now the computer doesn't boot up at all. Have I fried it? Any suggestions? HELP!

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Can you get to BIOS? Or tried a bootdisk yet?

[Garobill]

No, I can't get to the bios now. Before I did this trick, I could. Funny, the first time I powered up after finding the problem, I DID get to bios, but after completing the settings (minimal..time, date), instead of booting up, I got a smattering of "gibberish" (small, various icons), at which point everything stopped. Subsequently, the "dead" computer, with nothing following CMOS resets.
A possible break, I had the BIOS set for floppy boot first (hadn't gotten around to changing it yet).

[Budfred]

It usually wouldn't hurt anything to set the BIOS to boot the floppy first, it will just go on to second boot if there isn't anything in the drive.

I wonder if you knocked anything loose when you were in there moving these jumpers around. I would check all your connections carefully. Also, the comment about getting gibberish would worry me that there might be some damage to the board or CPU, was your CPU heatsink/fan set up and working properly when you were checking the system out?

It may be a good idea to disconnect all drives and go with a minimal boot to see how it goes. If still no joy, try a minimal boot out of the case on a nonconductive surface (like a piece of cardboard).

[Garobill]

Budfred,
Thanks for the advice so far. I am virtually certain I didn't do any inadvertant "disconnecting" or "messing with" when I did the jumper work. The area around the jumpers in question is very open and accessible. The cpu fan (Volcano 9) was working properly at the time, and still is.
I'll try your suggestion, and remove everything, including the board, and do a minimal hookup outside the case. I have this uneasy feeling that I did a job on the BIOS, and will have to send the MB back to Newegg. Worse, I'll have to 'fess up to the stupid thing I did!

[Budfred]

Just having the CMOS jumper in the wrong position shouldn't mess up the BIOS so I suspect the problem is something else. The minimal boot should tell you whether the board and CPU is ok anyway....