karusho

My cousin's computer, which had numerous problems on it already, has now decided to quit booting to any disks.

When I first turned it on after taking it home, the monitor showed the usual black screen and white characters. However, when it usually boots to a Hard Disk or CD, it just hangs.

I can't say I ever expected the computer to work as long as it has, as it's a crappy GQ 7000 from Fry's. As far as I can tell, these are the specs:

Macron Power 300W
ECS 661FX-M
Hitachi Desktar 80GB
Emprex DVD-ROM
??? DVD-RW (I am unable to determine the brand of the drive.)
768 MB DDR RAM (256+512)

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.



On a side note, I have another motherboard. On the old one, the CPU has pins and drops into some holes in the motherboard. However, the new motherboard has pins in the CPU area. Can anyone tell me what this is about?

TheMatt

If you can post the last line it shows before it hangs, that would be helpful in determining the problem.

The motherboard with pins in the socket is an LGA (land grid array) motherboard. The pins are on the board and the CPU has small contacts called lands. A lever pushes down on the CPU with a lot of force creating an excellent connection. The LGA design also allows much more heatsink pressure.

This is opposed to PGA (pin grid array) where there are pins on the processor which go into holes on the socket. Pushing the lever down puts pressure on the pins and contacts in the socket creating a tight connection.

karusho

Hmm... It seems to have been a CMOS error. I accidentally popped out the battery, and after popping it back in, it works.

But I'm doing a fresh wipe anyway, as it is riddled with viruses that I'm too lazy to manually clean.

TheMatt

You cleared the CMOS which reset the BIOS settings. That is a common fix. When you boot the computer for the first time after clearing the CMOS, it will give a checksum error, but this is normal and it won't show this error again.