[headshot]

Recently I sold my motherboard to a friend of mine. It was an Abit BX-133 with RAID. It also had my old memory and my old CPU still attached to it. Those were two 128mb PC133 DIMMs and an Intel Pentium III 1000Mhz Processor. He put it all in his case and attached all the necessary connectors. He also put in alongside my memory, one 64mb PC66.

According to him this is what happened ...

It booted up first time and the memory clocked in at 320mb. It listed his hard drive and CDRoms as not found and asked for a boot disk. He then held down the power switch until it shut down. Went and found a boot disk and powered it up again. This time the screen was completely blank. He also noticed holding in the power button didnt shut it down.

He then came back to me telling me what had happened. I expected him to have toasted the board but the LED was lit, the PSU fan was spinning, the case fan was spinning and the CPU fan was spinning.

All these things told me the board was getting power. As to why nothing was appearing on the screen remains a mystery. He tried another monitor with it but the 2nd one did pretty much the same, only it went into permanent standby mode judging from the orange light on the front of it.

The 3 lock keys on the keyboard light up at first but flick off again. The 2 CDRom drives both have power as you can see from the green lights on each.

However when I attach an IDE cable to either of the CDRom drives, the light on the front stays off and they wont eject which suggests the IDE cables prevent them from powering up, which to me just does not make sense.

I seem to remember having something similar happen to myself when I was building a PC once but I cant for the life of me figure out how I got round it. Does anyone else know of this?
I really dont know what the problem is.

Im quite sure the board worked before it was given to him and I can see him telling me I sold him a faulty motherboard. I will deny that saying he killed it when he first set it up. If it worked the first time but not anymore, it wasnt faulty when I gave it to him, right?

Sorry for the ultra long post but I wanted to include as much information about the problem as possible. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[V0lt]

try removing the BIOS battery for a while...no idea if it'll work, but I've seen people on this board have success with it.

 

[headshot]

Hi Fox.

Thanks for your reply but we tried that already and it made no difference. We also tried another battery and discharging the CMOS by altering the jumper setting close by. Im completely stumped.

 

[Guest]

He may have grounded the motherboard on a standoff.

Lets try the old out of the case routine..

Disconnect everything off of the motherboard except the CPU, Heatsink and Fan.

Take the motherboard out of the case and lay it on a phone book or something non conductive.

Hook up the following items only.

Hook up the wire that comes from the power button on the front of the case to the correct header, See manual.

Hook up the the power supply to the motherboard.

Insert one stick of ram.

Insert the video card all the way.

Hook up the monitor.

Hook up power to computer.

Turn on the monitor.

Turn on computer.

You should have video on the monitor.

This sounds like a lot of work but it narrows down the devices to a few.

Try this and post back with the results, Relax and take your time...

 

[MrGnome]

Are You still here?

I realize this is an ooold thread :lol:, but i have the same problem with the same motherboard. Did you ever manage to get it running again?

 

[MrGnome]

Update

Well, I found the bad guys! They were 3 dry capacitors just next to the atx power supply connector. If they are heated the computer works, so I'm going to change them. So if anyone else has this problem, might be a good idea to check those capacitors for leakage. :bgrin: