Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Conversation >

PC help needed please

12:25 / 08.03.05

My computer won’t boot up and it’s beginning to look as though it’s seriously fucked, so anyone who can help me will be my very favourite person all this week, and maybe next week too. I’ve never played with the inside of a computer before, but as you’ll see below I’ve tried a few things on advice of a guy at work, but I thought it’d be worth seeing if any lithers can come up with ideas that he might not have considered.

My PC used to freeze fairly often, and other times it would actually reboot itself and give me an error message saying something about “beginning dump of physical memory” and “check your hardware installations”. But nothing serious ever happened. A couple of times my Mozilla bookmarks got junked though which was annoying.

Then last week when I turned it on I got this picture of a gold medal that says “Design Quality Innovation”. Fortunately after a few tries it worked again, but then the next day it stopped and I haven’t yet been able to make it boot. I just get this same screen.

I have since found out that the gold medal screen is the splash screen of the BIOS, which has the option of displaying instead of the screen where it shows the PC detecting the RAM and drives. The BIOS was obviously set not to show that, so somehow it has reset itself to show this screen, which wouldn’t be a problem if it didn’t get stuck on it.

So I tried to get into the BIOS to find any clues but I can’t get in no matter what key I press. The only single key that does anything is ESC. When I press that on startup I get to a screen showing this:

P6V694X Advance 10B BIOS V4.2SLCP Jan 19 2001

Main Processor: Intel Pentium III 733MHz (133x5.5)

Memory Testing: 196608K OK

Press DEL to enter SETUP

But when I press DEL nothing happens! I also tried:

- Trying another graphics card
- Resetting the memory
- Taking out the battery from the BIOS memory for half an hour to reset it

None of these worked. So in the end I tried unplugging everything non-essential from the motherboard but still no difference.

So, it looks as though something is seriously fucked but how do I found out what the specific problem is?

Is there a boot disk I can get to make the computer start up so I can explore further?

What would cause the BIOS to keep getting stuck on this screen?

All help greatly appreciated!

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

12:41 / 08.03.05

I know you've taken out the BIOS battery, but might it be flat? I've had a PC not boot because the BIOS battery had died, worked fine after I replaced it.

12:49 / 08.03.05

I tried another battery (from a working machine) and it didn't make a difference. All batteries are compatible as long as they fit aren't they?

13:31 / 08.03.05

does your pc beep when it starts up...if yes ,how many beeps till it freezes

13:37 / 08.03.05

Just the one beep as usual.

13:44 / 08.03.05

the replacement graphics card....did you install this into the same slot as the one that came out of the pc?

13:46 / 08.03.05

Yep. I figured that was the only spot for it.

14:02 / 08.03.05

update your bios
http://www.qdigrp.com/qdisite/eng/support/d_advance10E.htm

its not that tricky...see if that helps,sounds like your pc was flaky to start with,what was the model and what os were you running?

14:31 / 08.03.05

Thanks for the help trixr4kids. I don't know much about computers so I'm still getting my head around this stuff. Just reading through that page you linked to, am I wanting to flash the BIOS or am I following the instructions at the bottom about problems encountered after flashing BIOS?

It says:

Prepare a bootable floppy disk with an AWDFLASH.EXE utility and BIOS binary file in the disk. Create an AUTOEXEC.BAT file in the diskette with the following command line: AWDFLASH xxxxx.BIN/SN /PY

Is this what I should be doing? And how do I create an autoexec file?

14:43 / 08.03.05

if you download the zip file and look at the readme.txt it should clear things up....i'll check back later if you get stuck with it...look on the bright side,if you make a hash of the bios upgrade you get a lovely pc shaped toaster for your troubles

14:48 / 08.03.05

That doesn't exactly fill me with confidence! I suppose a PC shaped toaster is better than a PC shaped hole in the window and a PC shaped hole in the pavement, which is on the cards if I can't get the thing to boot up.

17:05 / 09.03.05

Well I tried the boot disk and nothing happened. The light on the floppy drive doesn't come on at all so I think the machine is actually freezing before it even gets to the point where it checks the A drive.

Any more ideas?

12:14 / 19.03.05

Good news! After a couple of weeks of despair, I took it into work and the IT guy had a look at it. There's a jumper on the motherboard that sets the speed (this is all news to me!) and it had been set to auto which obviously had been working fine and he didn't think that could be the problem, but when he set it manually to a lower speed then it worked fine. Rather odd. He reckons I won't even notice the slower speed so best just to leave it at that if it works. I don't know if the BIOS resetting itself had anything to do with that or not but who cares really.

Thanks for the help though everyone. I do however have another question:

My machine is networked to Ariadne's for net usage (hers is the main machine) but it doesn't work now. Would this have been something to do with the BIOS fucking up? Do I need to re-do anything? I tried running the network setup wizard again and it seemed to work fine but still the internet won't connect on mine. Any ideas?