Won't boot - does 'power cycling' prove it's the motherboard?

HalfManHalfBiscuit

HalfManHalfBiscuit

Geek Trainee
Won't boot - on/off switch light comes on, fans spin, some hard disk activity, CD drive runs; but nothing to the monitor.

Tried flashing BIOS with ASUS CrashFree BIOS 3 utility but it does not seem to work, nothing out to monitor. Did clrtc jumper thing and shorted battery terminals.

The question is: Would it be a waste of money buying a pre-flashed BIOS chip?

Reason I ask is: It says on a hardware advice website, http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000607.htm :

"Power cycle the computer

In some situations a computer may have power related issues often caused by either the power supply or the motherboard. To help determine if this is the cause of your issue try turning the computer on, off, and back on as fast as possible, making sure the computer power light goes on and off each time. In some situations you may be able to temporarily get the computer to boot.

This should only be used as a temporary workaround if you're able to get this to work. Often this is good for users who may have not done a backup and need to get the computer up one more time to copy files before starting to replace hardware."

I got it to boot normally into the operating system by switching it on, waiting then hard rebooting. It did this twice, but I left it on overnight and it had gone down again the next day. So I'm wondering if this is the same as 'power cycle' from the quote. If so buying a new BIOS chip might be a waste of money??

I did however once, out of the blue, get output to the monitor and it went on about BIOS checksum error.

Know very little about this sort of thing so any advice appreciated.
 
Lets take another route. List the full specs of your system and the wattage of your power supply, because it could be that you lack the necessary output required to boot up your PC. Next, have you tried playing with the ram sticks? One of them could be faulty. Take em all out, put one in, boot up. Do this with all your sticks.
This is worth a shot: 3 years ago i had a similar issue. Light and fans were running but had no display. Turns out i had to reset my CMOS to get everything up and fully running.
 
Thanks.

Motherboard: ASUS-M2N-SLI AM2 DDR2 Audio GBLan SATA RAID
DVD RW LightScribe
AMD Athlon 64 5000+ X2 Dual Core 2.6GHz 1MB Cache Socket AM2
250GB 7200RPM SATA II Hard drive
500GB Seagate Hard drive
RAM 4GB (4x1GB) DDR2 800MHz
built-in audio, Logitech S-500 5.1 Surround set
Graphics card nVidia GeForce GT430
TV capture PCI Card)

Power supply max output 350 watts.

Computer was unused for several months because nVidia GeForce 8400GS 256MB was buggered, put in above graphics card to replace it. Then problems when tried to start box.

Like you said cleared CMOS and put one memory stick in. Temporarily got output and it entered setup. Setup said BIOS checksum error, using defaults - something like that. The setup menu worked properly, got it once before and it didn't. Just changed boot order, nothing else, and exited.

Now back to no output.

Perhaps should have used the BIOS flashing thing in the setup menu??

Oddly perhaps it keeps changing its behavior, hard drive activity for example.
 
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