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Dead motherboard- Jump pin?


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#1
Cobra3537

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Hi everyone!

Need a little help- My mom has an older computer that was put together. When it's turned on, about 5-10 seconds later it starts to make a siren like noise. It has an ABIT-WX6 motherboard and a celeron processor. A few years back when I upgraded my own computer, after installing the new MB/CPU, it too made a similar noise. My brother-in-law (whose a 6th degree black belt nerd) had me jump 2 pins which allowed me to access the bios program. Does anyone know where these pins might be located on this MB? Thanks for the help! :whistling:
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#2
OwNt

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Link, page 23.

If clearing the cmos doesn't help make sure everything is on tightly - particularly the heatsink, video card, and ram.

Let me know how it goes. :whistling:
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#3
Cobra3537

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Thanks for the reply!

On my original post, I failed to mention that the monitor said that no signal was found, check cable. Anyway, I switched out the motherboard with one I had laying around from a few upgrades ago (a compaq presario with a celeron processor). Success, or so I thought, the computer fired up but after going through the red and white Compaq screen, the next message came back "Operating system not found".

I went into bios and on the main screen I saw that nothing was identified as primary or secondary masters. I changed the parameters of the Master to match that of the hard drive in use (cylinders, heads and sectors) and set the secondary as the CD-ROM (although the computer is equipped with a DVD-ROM). I set the boot sequence to begin with as 1-HD, 2-CD. After saving the settings I tried again to bring up the OS (Win-'98 installed) to no avail (the same message appeared). Next I went back into bios and in the main screen I noticed that again there were no primary or secondary masters identified (although it did save the parameters I'd entered for the HD). I set up the primary and secondaries once more and on the boot up sequence set it for 1-CD, 2-HD. I have an extra Win XP program so after saving the settings I inserted the disc and tried to boot up the system and install XP. Again it said "Operating system not found" (I tried both inserting the disc after and before bootup- no luck).

A couple things, is it possible it's had a head crash? Its not accessing the HD even after setting the correct parameters in bios. Another item, in bios, it only lists CD-ROM not DVD-ROM- would that be preventing it from reading the XP disc? Thanks for your help!
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#4
Cobra3537

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Update-

While waiting for any replies, I thought "What the [bleep], lets change out the wiring from the HD and DVD-ROM" and wouldn't you know it, bingo- it worked :whistling: I wasn't able to boot up the HD but I did get the XP disc to load and right now its going through its setup paces. Hopefully it's successful!
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#5
Cobra3537

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Spoke too soon-

After XP goes through it's initial setup phase and reboots for the first time, it comes back up wanting to go through the same steps again (where to set up the partition and copy files). After the Eula, it shows that the file system is set up the same way it was formatted prior to reboot and when prompted it says there are files there (the ones it placed). I let it run a few times but all it's doing is running the same initial setup as it had. I even tried formatting the HD both ways (NTFS & Fat32) with the same results. Any suggestions?
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#6
Cobra3537

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Just an update;

Stayed up late last night trying to install XP and that was part of the problem! Last night, I saw that bios had identified the primary master- it did- by my own parameters. I just didn't recognize this last night. Today I set the primary to auto detect and wala, it identified the HD by name and proper specs. (on my last post I failed to mention that after the initial XP setup, when the disc was removed and it rebooted starting from the HD, the screen came up "Operating system not found". That prompted me to double check the bios primary master setting and there the problem lay- it wasn't "seeing" the HD at all!)

After exiting bios with the correct settings, XP set up just fine and this once deceased computer is now alive and well! :whistling:
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