[Shawneegal]

Hello,

A friend recently gave me a computer of his that he had built 4 years ago, which contains an ASUS A8V-MX Motherboard. He has had lots of virus issues with it because he was dumb enough to allow the guy that built it for him to install a pirated copy of Windows XP Professional. Instead of buying and installing a legitimate OS, he bought another PC and gave me this one. Naturally, I want to get rid of the pirated OS and am going to install a Linux-based OS on it instead.

The problem I am having is that I cannot access the Boot or Setup screens. When the initial screen pops up, I press Tab (which I learned from the ASUS support website, was the correct key), it gives me about 1/2 a second to press F8 (to enter boot) or Delete (to enter setup). I've tried doing both, and each time the screen goes blank after I press either the F8 or Delete key. I ctrl-alt-del to get it to move on and it starts Windows. What can I do to get it to show the Boot screen in order to change the boot order so I can replace this OS?

Here is additional system info:
ASUS A8V-MS
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 0111 09/26/2005
AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3200+
Seagate ST3160812AS Barracuda 7200.9 SATA 160-GB Hard Drive
SONY DVD RW DW-Q120A

Thank you,
~S

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Hi Shawneegal You could try clearing the CMOS this will restore the motherboards factory settings.
To do this you need to remove the power cord, remove the side of the case & remove the silver CR2032 battery for a couple of minutes, replace the battery, re-connect all the leads back up and boot up, whilst booting up tap the F8 key to get into the BIOS and change the boot order to CD first and HDD second, make sure you save the settings and exit, pop the new OS disk into the CD/DVD drive, shutdown and then reboot, the screen should say "press any key to boot from CD" press yes and follow the onscreen instructions.
Hope this helps and if you require further assistance I will be happy to help as will others be.

[phillpower2]

Hi Shawneegal You could try clearing the CMOS this will restore the motherboards factory settings.
To do this you need to remove the power cord, remove the side of the case & remove the silver CR2032 battery for a couple of minutes, replace the battery, re-connect all the leads back up and boot up, whilst booting up tap the F8 key to get into the BIOS and change the boot order to CD first and HDD second, make sure you save the settings and exit, pop the new OS disk into the CD/DVD drive, shutdown and then reboot, the screen should say "press any key to boot from CD" press yes and follow the onscreen instructions.
Hope this helps and if you require further assistance I will be happy to help as will others be.

[Shawneegal]

Thank you phillpower2. I was finally able to access the BIOS and change the boot order. My video card is no longer recognized, so I now have to use the video connection on the motherboard, but I have accessed the screens I needed. Problem solved. Thanks again for your help. Now off to the forum for my new OS to figure out how to get it to install.

~S

[phillpower2]

I am happy you got it sorted and thank you for letting us know
Once you have installed the new OS you will be able to install the drivers
for your graphics card