First post, by Kahenraz
- Rank
- l33t
I was testing a video card I'd ordered from eBay and was having some very strange and inconsistent results. The system did not boot, card needed to be reseated, sometimes it worked but did not on reboot, and then I got a message telling me of a problem with my BIOS ROM! Another reboot and the system appeared dead. Surely the problem lies with the BIOS and it is only now acting up. So I swapped to a different board.
But the problems persisted and I even received another corrupt ROM message on that motherboard! There were also very scary issues where the system would not boot at all with no codes displaying on my POST card after reverting to a different video card. Several power cycles, reseating parts, and disconnecting and reconnecting the power supply brought it back to life.
The only thing that was consistent was this card I was testing. I used my multimeter and found a dead short across several capacitors. Who knows what's wrong with the thing but this was very scary. I hope I didn't do any permanent damage to anything.
Notice in the photo with the corrupt Energy Star logo it says "checksum error". I have a BIOS battery. Not only was the ROM affected but also the parts that are writable by the BIOS.
Also notice that the memory size got messed up and only detects 2048KB with three 128MB sticks installed. This would have been after a warm reboot while doing diagnostics.