First post, by RetroSpector78
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Hi,
I have an Intel D845GEBV2 P4 motherboard that is no longer booting.
I got the PC a couple of days ago and played with it for a couple of days, installed windows XP, ran some benchmarks. No issues.
Caps seem to be in a good condition (visually). No bulging / leaking.
But now I get no video output anymore. But what does happen is that the floppy drive is constantly seeking (dunno how you call it), asking for a floppy disk it seems (every 5 seconds or so).
When I insert a floppy disk it seems to pick it up and there is some disk activity for a couple of seconds. But then it stops.
As far as hardware goes, I tried different RAM, GPU, PSU and also tried the components under test with another P4 motherboard. Those seem to work. So the culprit has to be the D845GEBV2.
I read the manual of the D845GEBV2 board, and there is a BIOS Setup Recovery mode, where "the BIOS recovers data from a recovery diskette in the event of a failed BIOS update". I thought perhaps the BIOS get screwed up and it ended up in this recovery mode.
Now I did create such a recovery disk (I think it is the correct one, I picked it up from here : https://drivers.eu/Mainboards/INTEL/D845GEBV2
It is a dos based archive that creates a bootable disk with an autoexec.bat that should do the bios upgrade.
The Intel manual also has a "Recovering the BIOS section" where it stats that in the event BIOS corruption occured, there is no video support and you will not see anything on the screen. Monitor the procedure by listening to the speakr and looking at the diskette drive LED.
But although it does seem to pick up the disk, and there is some disk activity for a couple of seconds, I don't have the impression it is actually doing something (as a test I put a beep.com in the autoexec.bat and didn't hear anything, where as on another computer it did).
I am at a bit of a loss as to what to do next. I could replace the caps but they look clean so I am not sure that is the issue. Fact that it goes into this floppy drive seek loop is strange. Under "normal" conditions you never hear the floppy as it is configured to boot from harddrive.
Before the motherboard failed I was testing a repair job on an FX5200 AGP videocard. A broken FX5200 videocard was showing weird artifacts on screen and I did boot with that card and the intel board a couple of times. Could that have corrupted something ?
Any thoughts ?