gladders wrote:

Hello, yes, it's me again. […]
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Hello, yes, it's me again.

So I have this BX-6, which I covet for its 440BX chipset, as you all likely know. I recently moved it to a new case, but then it kept freezing on the memory check at boot. Turns out it was a modem card that I was just using to fill an empty slot, so I took it out.

Now I can't get it to POST properly. Upon resetting the CMOS, it boots defaults, but when changing settings in BIOS, I get problems.

It's a 450MHz Pentium III processor, but on default the BIOS reports it as 300Mhz. So I change that, and I set the IDE detection settings.

Once I do that, it simply refuses to POST. Blank screen.

I have resetted it tons of times, and tried to let it boot on just 300Mhz settings. It stops after the memory check reporting a CMOS settings error.

Help?

Two things come to my mind:

1. Bad capacitors - they can explain almost ALL weird behavior
2. CMOS battery dead - if just on the threshold, it might produce weird results. For all it's worth, it is pretty easy and affordable to give it a try?

I've replaced the battery and no difference, so I guess it must be caps then.

Ugh. I hate doing caps. I nearly always fuck it up.

Maybe atx header is corroded? Does that MB show voltage rail readings in the BIOS?

I've just tried an entirely different motherboard and entirely different PSU both of which I know work and this new board won't POST either! What am I doing?!

bad ram, bad cpu, bad video card, cables backwards etc.

Tried different video card. RAM seems good. Two different CPUs (and the ABIT boots until I fiddle with the BIOS)

Maybe it is cables...which ones?!

unplug all of the drive cables. double check your ram, try different sticks individually.

Thanks. It was a cable put in the wrong way round. I'll remember in future! Thanks!