HELP! Bad motherboard??

[Stonewall44]

This morning I went to my computer to find a completely white screen with a black border on my monitor. I tried to reboot my computer and it went to a screen that told me that my computer didn't boot properly, do I want to continue normally, safe mode, blah, blah, blah. Thinking I had no real problem, I told it to boot normally. It went to the first boot screen then nothing. I turned it off and back on with the same results. This time, I told it to boot with the last known good configuration, same problem. Now when I turn it on I get nothing on the monitor, black screen. I have a spare monitor and have changed the monitors with no improvement. I tried to boot from the Windows XP disk and nothing happens.

Last night when playing Soldier of Fortune II, my computer froze several times and I assumed that my game had gotten screwed up somehow and tried to fix the install several times and just wound up uninstalling it entirely. I had planned on doing a fresh install this morning. Note: I did get a blue screen about hardware changes a couple of times. I had no other problems with the computer other than when in this game. Everything else worked perfectly.

My motherboard is a new MSI K7N2L and has a "D" bracket with diagnostic LED's. The LED configuration is telling me that it is hanging up at "memory detection test". Since I'd had a RAM chip fail a couple months ago, I knew that this can cause all sorts of problems. I pulled each chip out individually and restarted the computer with no change in the situation. Now I've noticed that the keyboard lights aren't working, and I have no temperature readings on my hardcano.

I'm thinking bad motherboard. Help......please.

AMD Athlon XP 2000 @ 1.67 ghz
MSI K7N2L motherboard
Crucial PC 2100 DDR ram
IBM 40Gig Hard Drive
Thermaltake Xaser III case
Thermaright SLK800 heat sink
Windows XP Home Edition (yeah, I know)

 

[sorehead]

Could be bad motherboard but was curious if you can replace your memory and try that first?

 

[Stonewall44]

Originally posted by: Stonewall44
This morning I went to my computer to find a completely white screen with a black border on my monitor. I tried to reboot my computer and it went to a screen that told me that my computer didn't boot properly, do I want to continue normally, safe mode, blah, blah, blah. Thinking I had no real problem, I told it to boot normally. It went to the first boot screen then nothing. I turned it off and back on with the same results. This time, I told it to boot with the last known good configuration, same problem. Now when I turn it on I get nothing on the monitor, black screen. I have a spare monitor and have changed the monitors with no improvement. I tried to boot from the Windows XP disk and nothing happens.

Last night when playing Soldier of Fortune II, my computer froze several times and I assumed that my game had gotten screwed up somehow and tried to fix the install several times and just wound up uninstalling it entirely. I had planned on doing a fresh install this morning. Note: I did get a blue screen about hardware changes a couple of times. I had no other problems with the computer other than when in this game. Everything else worked perfectly.

My motherboard is a new MSI K7N2L and has a "D" bracket with diagnostic LED's. The LED configuration is telling me that it is hanging up at "memory detection test". Since I'd had a RAM chip fail a couple months ago, I knew that this can cause all sorts of problems. I pulled each chip out individually and restarted the computer with no change in the situation. Now I've noticed that the keyboard lights aren't working, and I have no temperature readings on my hardcano.

I'm thinking bad motherboard. Help......please.

Update, by pressing the power button off/on several times I was able to get the computer to come on. First boot screen loads ok, then loads PCI device listing, successfully loads DMI pool, then it gets to the nVidia Boot Agent with the message

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.

So, I put in my WinXP disk and press enter and I get a blue screen of death that says:

***HARDWARE MALFUNCTION

Call your vendor for support

***The system has halted**


ah crap. Motherboard or hard drive? Now I'm thinking HD...

AMD Athlon XP 2000 @ 1.67 ghz
MSI K7N2L motherboard
Crucial PC 2100 DDR ram
IBM 40Gig Hard Drive
Thermaltake Xaser III case
Thermaright SLK800 heat sink
Windows XP Home Edition (yeah, I know)

 

[Stonewall44]

Originally posted by: Stonewall44
This morning I went to my computer to find a completely white screen with a black border on my monitor. I tried to reboot my computer and it went to a screen that told me that my computer didn't boot properly, do I want to continue normally, safe mode, blah, blah, blah. Thinking I had no real problem, I told it to boot normally. It went to the first boot screen then nothing. I turned it off and back on with the same results. This time, I told it to boot with the last known good configuration, same problem. Now when I turn it on I get nothing on the monitor, black screen. I have a spare monitor and have changed the monitors with no improvement. I tried to boot from the Windows XP disk and nothing happens.

Last night when playing Soldier of Fortune II, my computer froze several times and I assumed that my game had gotten screwed up somehow and tried to fix the install several times and just wound up uninstalling it entirely. I had planned on doing a fresh install this morning. Note: I did get a blue screen about hardware changes a couple of times. I had no other problems with the computer other than when in this game. Everything else worked perfectly.

My motherboard is a new MSI K7N2L and has a "D" bracket with diagnostic LED's. The LED configuration is telling me that it is hanging up at "memory detection test". Since I'd had a RAM chip fail a couple months ago, I knew that this can cause all sorts of problems. I pulled each chip out individually and restarted the computer with no change in the situation. Now I've noticed that the keyboard lights aren't working, and I have no temperature readings on my hardcano.

I'm thinking bad motherboard. Help......please.

Update, by pressing the power button off/on several times I was able to get the computer to come on. First boot screen loads ok, then loads PCI device listing, successfully loads DMI pool, then it gets to the nVidia Boot Agent with the message

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.

So, I put in my WinXP disk and press enter and I get a blue screen of death that says:

***HARDWARE MALFUNCTION

Call your vendor for support

***The system has halted**


ah crap. Motherboard or hard drive? Now I'm thinking HD...



AMD Athlon XP 2000 @ 1.67 ghz
MSI K7N2L motherboard
Crucial PC 2100 DDR ram
IBM 40Gig Hard Drive
Thermaltake Xaser III case
Thermaright SLK800 heat sink
Windows XP Home Edition (yeah, I know)

 

[Stonewall44]

Another update....not the hard drive. Went out and bought a new Maxtor and installed the HD....no change in the situation.

It won't let me get to safe mode. Everything I've described starts when I tell it to go to safe mode.

Right now I've got the battery out of the CMOS to see if that helps. I've looked up how to change the jumpers and will try that next....

Does the fact that I've got power to the fans that run off the mobo give any indication that the mobo may not be the problem?

anybody got any more ideas?

 

[fredtam]

Have you cleared the cmos? Any overclocking?

 

[Stonewall44]

Thank you for your reply Fredtam....

Ok....cleared the CMOS and that at least allowed me to get it to boot to Verifying DMI Pool Data.

I've reset jumpers 10 and 11 on my mobo that specify the CPU FSB and set it to 100 MHz. I've done that without and real change except that if I leave jumper 11 set at 133/166 MHz it boots to Verifying Pool Data.....Update Success then hangs. Whoopee! Not.

So, I'm stuck. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[Stonewall44]

Oh...and no overclocking. Everything is stock right now.

 

[Stonewall44]

Amazingly enough, it seems that I've fixed the problem.

It occurred to me that if pulling the J11 jumper caused the DMI Pool to Successfully update (which it had not been doing prior to that) then the next step should be to load Windows. I had put a new, clean HD in place of my old one and forgot to reinstall the old HD with winXP on it. I replaced the HD, checked all the connections again and rebooted.


LawdaMighty! I went to where I could get into safe mode, and from there I was able to reboot normally. Comp locked up once in safe mode, but I rebooted it and no more problems so far.

Glenvidia, I still intend to run memtest in a few minutes, just to be sure that I don't have a hardware problem, but I don't expect to find anything. I couldn't run it prior to this because the computer wouldn't boot. I had already pulled the mem sticks one at a time and tried to reboot, without any change in the situation.

As for the power supply, I fully intend to upgrade the PS shortly. This was the PS from my old computer (before the upgrade, an AMD 1 ghz).

My question now becomes "Where do I go from here?"

Jumper 10 and 11 have the FSB set at 100 mhz....should I change them back?

Any other diagnostics I should run other than memtest? I've run all my Norton Systemworks Pro stuff, Ad Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy (just to be sure) and RegCleaner. I found a missing .dll file and downloaded and installed the missing file (thank god for dll-files.com) and Norton no longer finds a missing dll.

What about bios settings? any changes you would recommend there?

Oh...and to those of you who responded, "Thank you."