Hi everyone,

I seem to be having a little problem with my PC. Wait, let me start of from the beginning...
It was a rainy sunday afternoon when I was entertaining myself with some quality gaming when suddenly a weird, but nice-looking pattern of stripes graced my monitor. So I rebooted, only to find the stripes had taken up permanent residence on my monitor.
I changed monitors and saw the same thing. Obviously the problem was in my videocard. So, a few weeks later I had enough money to buy a new videocard and after having installed it, my excitement quickly dissipated, because the rest of my PC had stopped functioning.
I get no image on my monitor, I get no beeps, all I get are a flashing light and some hexadecimal numbers in a small screen on my case. In the old days, the number would range all the way up to FF and stop there, but now it occasionally stops at C0 and all the other times at C5.
I checked all my connections, cables and cards, I triple checked the compatibility of my new video card, I even put my old broken video card back in (but I don't get stripes anymore, only sad and bitter nothingness), I don''t have warranty anymore, I stalked the helpdesk for a week to no avail, frankly, I am out of money and ideas....
So... I was wondering... does anyone have a clue what could be the problem? Please help me!

- Acefir

QUOTE (Acefir @ May 4 2005, 07:41 AM)

Hi everyone, I seem to be having a little problem with my PC. Wait, let me start of from the beginning... It was a rainy sunday afternoon when I was entertaining myself with some quality gaming when suddenly a weird, but nice-looking pattern of stripes graced my monitor. So I rebooted, only to find the stripes had taken up permanent residence on my monitor. I changed monitors and saw the same thing. Obviously the problem was in my videocard. So, a few weeks later I had enough money to buy a new videocard and after having installed it, my excitement quickly dissipated, because the rest of my PC had stopped functioning. I get no image on my monitor, I get no beeps, all I get are a flashing light and some hexadecimal numbers in a small screen on my case. In the old days, the number would range all the way up to FF and stop there, but now it occasionally stops at C0 and all the other times at C5. I checked all my connections, cables and cards, I triple checked the compatibility of my new video card, I even put my old broken video card back in (but I don't get stripes anymore, only sad and bitter nothingness), I don''t have warranty anymore, I stalked the helpdesk for a week to no avail, frankly, I am out of money and ideas.... So... I was wondering... does anyone have a clue what could be the problem? Please help me! - Acefir

It could be your motherboard is toast.

The more details you provide the quicker the help.

What O/S are you running?

Can you start the system with a boot disk?

What is the make/model # of your motherboard?

It could be your motherboard, or the power supply, or your memory. Have you tried reseating the memory? Did it get "bumped" while you were inside the system?

You could download Memtest86, make a boot floppy from the downloaded image file, and boot the machine and do complete tests on the memory. (If your machine will boot from a floppy boot disk.) This test will eliminate the memory from the equation.

Everest Home Edition (Freeware) will tell you all sorts of things about your system hardware.

I checked my motherboard and it's a chaintech Apogee 865PE. But the problem is that my PC doesn't start doing anything at all. It has power and the fans are rotating, but it's not checking RAM, or booting up from either harddrive or floppydisk. I have tested the RAM on the machine I am currently writing on and it seems to be working fine.

Acefir, try to reset your BIOS back to default settings and try to reboot. You can use a jumper on the mainboard or pull the battery for 1/2 hour and then snap it back in.

The following presupposes that you can get into the bios.

There should be a setting in the bios for this so you don't have to open the system. "Load Setup Defaults" or similar. This should return the bios to factory settings where pretty well anything connected properly should run, albeit slow. ie; Memory timings, IDE Auto detect, etc.

I can't quite see the bios screen, because my monitor doesn't display anything. But judging by the way my keyboard doesn't function either, the bios can't be entered anyway. Sadly my motherboard seems to be having a surprising lack of jumpers to reset. Basicly, the PC does nothing but flash a light and display C0.

Are you using a Celeron D processor? If so, and your current bios revision is 1.0, there's a "fix" on the Chaintech site under Downloads.

(BIOS Ver. 2.0)
Feature :Fixed that some Celeron D cause system hold on BIOS Setup screen.

Sorry, it's a pentium 4...

Here:

Socket 478 Intel® Celeron/Pentium 4 400/533/800MHz FSB, ATX, Intel 865PE + ICH5

BIOS

Utility

Manual

Drivers for Motherboard

Memory Compatibility list

Feature Highlights
Form Factor ATX (305mm x 244mm)

CPU Supports Intel Socket 478 CPU with Hyper-Threading Technology
Supports Intel Pentium4/Celeron system bus at 400/533/800MHz

Chipset Intel 865PE + ICH5, supports Hyper-Threading Technology

Main Memory Four 184-pin DDR DIMMs up to 4GB
Supports Dual-Channel DDR266/333/400 memory


Expansion Slots One 1.5V AGP slot for 4X/8X AGP
Five 32-Bit PCI slots (v2.2 compliant)
One CMR (Chaintech Multimedia Riser) for
Chaintech Multimedia Card (CMC 5.1)

Audio Subsystem With external high quality 5.1-Channel AC'97 Codec
Complete software driver support for Windows OS
Supports S/PDIF out

Video Subsystem Video 4X/8X AGP

IDE Build-in ICH5 supports 2 UltraDMA-33/66/100 IDE ports

Embedded USB Controller Build-in ICH5 supports total 8 USB 2.0/1.1 ports
Supports USB 2.0 High-Speed Device @480 Mb/s
Transfer Rates

On Board Super I/O Controller ITE 8712 LPC Super I/O with system monitoring hardware
2 temperatures sensing for CPU and system
3 Fan speed monitoring (CPU, System and Northbridge)
One FDD connector supports up to 2.88MB

Boot-Block Flash ROM Award system BIOS supports PnP, APM, DMI, ACPI, & Multi-device booting features

Software Driver CD (Chipset Autodetect)

Value Pack 2003

APOGEE Overclocking Utility

Other Feature Back panel I/O connector
One PS/2 Mouse and Keyboard port
Four USB ports and one RJ45 connector
Two 9-pin D-Sub male Serial ports
One 25-pin D-Sub female Parallel port
Audio I/O jacks (Line-in, Line-out and Mic-in)

On-board LAN controller

On-board LAN chip RTL8100C supports 10/100Mb Fast Ethernet
On-board SATA Controller

Build-in ICH5 supports 2 Serial ATA devices for the highest data transfer rates (1.5Gbps burst)

Internal I/O connectors
Four 3x1 pin fan connectors
Two 5x2 pin USB connectors for additional 4 USB ports
3x1 pin wake on LAN connector with housing
3x1 pin wake on Modem connector with housing
Two 4x1 pin CD-in connectors with housing on CMC5.1
4x1 pin Aux-in connector with housing on CMC5.1
9x2 pin front panel connector
5x2 pin front side audio connector
20 pin ATX Power connector
4 pin ATX 12V Power connector

i don't if i can help you much but i'll try...

reset the BIOS and taking the out the CMOS battery on the motherboard and probably a few seconds then install back.... Install a good condition RAM on the motherboard and see if the PC runs or not......

by the way,your saying that nice-looking pattern of stripes shown in your monitor, is it the stripes red,yellow and green in colour or maybe more colours than that something like that??
if it is, then maybe there is something to do with the monitor's connector...
try check if the connector's pins break or lost....

if the stripes has no colours and it's like the whole view is completely block with the stripes(example like you can hardly see the words written on monitor), then maybe there is problem with your RAM.....
try borrow RAM from a friend and test and see whether the graphic is ok or not....

This is common after switching video cards. You may have a "floating" video card. This means you have to find the "sweet spot" where it will work in the slot. Sometimes all it needs is to be backed off a bit, other times it takes some real searching. If you have access to one, try a known, working PCI video card just to see if you get a picture.

Ok, I have taken my entire PC apart, tested each part individually, messed around with my bios-chip, gathered all the videocards I could find, but for some reason all I get is absolute and utter blackless. The only thing I can't reach is the processor, since there is a huge fan bolted on it. The screws are blocked in turn by transistors which I don't feel comfortable removing. I recall now that before the total blackout occured the noise emmited by the fan had increased. I don't know if that could be related to my current situation?

You stated in an earlier post; "It has power and the fans are rotating.."

"...... the noise emmited by the fan had increased."

Is the CPU fan still running when power is applied?

Does it seem to run smoothly and provide good air flow?

CPU's heat up pretty quick. If the air flow is/was blocked by dust buildup the CPU could have been damaged. Or worse, fried. If you've "taken (the) entire PC apart, tested each part individually" and these components test as good, then what's left is the CPU and motherboard (and possibly the power suppy). If you (or friends) have spare units laying around you can swap out these (three) components one by one to find out where the problem lies.

If not, then your best bet is to (install the memory and video card(s) and) take it to a reputable shop and find out how much for them to verify which component is bad.