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Boot trouble

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by jacook

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I have a Compaq Presario 5000 on my work bench. When it boots, all it does is the lights on the keyboard flash on and off. I removed the FFD, HDD, CD drives off the system board and tried a differant vidio card. I still get the same thing. I'm thinking MoBo's dead. Am I close?

14 replies

by otl

Congrats ! You have been compaqed! Best I can say is good luck with the system. Not a fan, and have very little to say !

by thechas

3 things I do before declaring a MB as dead.

1. Check the power supply. Either measure the voltages at the pins, or swap in a known good supply.

2. Swap in known good RAM. With some Compaqs, this can be tricky. Use the oldest DIMM that you have.

3. Swap the CPU.

If all of the above are good, then the motherboard is bad.

Another thing I do, is look over the motherboard for signs of overstressed parts.
Look around the modem and voltage regulator sections for bulged or chared parts.

Chas

by cg it

well, here's a run down on the POST. Power on, Chipset initialization, memory test, BIOS to RAM, Keyboard initialization[keyboard lights go on then off], VGA BIOS, Processor initialization, Real Time Clock, Test Video interface, BIOS sign on, Test Base and Extend Memory, Assign Resources to ISA, Initialze Hard Drive, Initialize Floppy drive, Boot attempt to read boot master boot code, then off to O/S boot.
From your description, you got to keyboard initialization, and you've removed all drives and used a new video card, so that narrows it down to Vid interface[if AGP could be bad AGP slot][try a PCI slot vid card], processor or memory. If you've got a compatible processor and memory laying around, swap out and test. If you still have problems, yep, probably toasted motherboard.

by cg it

this is where a good POST card comes in real handy (and I know the damn things can cost upwards of $200 to $300, [which in my oppinion is robbery]. There are some $40 to $60 ones, BUT, who knows about their accuracy. It's quite possible that the processor is the culprit(is the processor a Slot or PGA?). I've seen a lot of Intel Slot processors that have gone bad after a year or two(planned breakdown?).

by deroode

When all the lights are flashing at the same time your motherboard is probably dead. When the lights are flashing in consecutive order (num - caps - scroll) it is compaq's way to ask for a boot password.
Anyway, try to clear the CMOS memory (usually a switch or jumper)

Just my 2?c

by ssheldon

Sounds like a dead MB as you suspected. If you have the ability, test the individual componets in another system, otherwise, do as one of the other posts suggested and try a different PS.

by sonnguyen

I would remove everything attached to the mobo. except the cpu, psu and memory and if there isn't on board graphic use one of the known good video card and connect it to a powered-on monitor. If still no signal to the monitor try swapping psu, cpu and memory, try one change at a time and (for me) in this order:
a. memory (easiest)
b. psu (just swap the connectors)
c. the cpu.
If after all of the above, there is still no signal to the monitor, yes your motherboard is faulty.

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