Desktop

Try replacing the battery on your motherboard.

Your CPU may have over-heated and now does not work properly.

It is possible that your BIOS has been damaged by a virus. However, you need to be able to boot up from a floppy in order to flash the BIOS.
CAUTION: If you decide to try flashing the BIOS, follow ALL precautions in the instructions!!!

Chas

Have you tried the 'clear cmos' jumper on the
motherboard? If so, consider removing the
battery fifteen minutes (with system shut down)
put the battery back in then start the system.

Do not start the system without the battery in.
(I've been quite lucky a few times....)

You were downloading a file from a service that is in the top 10 methods of propigating virus, worms, and trojans over the internet.

These programs can and have caused everything from reformating your hard drive to attacking the cmos in a computer.

Now this might all be a fluke. But if it was me I would remove the hard drive and install it as a slave on a machine that has an up to date virus program and do a thorough scan.

While the hard drive is out.

Next I would set the jumper to reset the bios and see if you can boot to floppy. If you can I would Download the latest bios update and flash the bios.

If not go to this page and follow the procedure to recover your bios.

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/support/bios/bos/spt_bos_list.php

Remember delete spaces that occur during copy and paste.

Once you have your board running on a floppy and you are sure your drive is clean reinstall the hard drive and try to boot.

If you can get this far update us an we can go from there.

Lee

When these kinds of problems occur I generally follow this protocol:

1) if your computer will boot to a point where you can enter the BIOS then do so and just exit (without changing anything) and save the settings.
This generally 'resets' a confused BIOS and in many cases will start:

If this is successful then great... if not then try (2)

2) Again this assumes you can boot to the bios, Enter the bios and remove the bios virus checker (usually under the advanced settings) and then exit saving the settings and reboot

if this is successful then great (again!) else try (3)

3) Find the appropriate jumper to short out the bios therefore resetting it (on many motherboards it is the jumper that you had to change after hours of swearing at the machine when you built it because it didn't work as it was set incorrectly!) This is usually a 3 pin jumper where the jumper is usually over pins 1 and 2. ENSURE THE POWER LEAD IS NOT CONNECTED as it can fry the bios chip completely (there is enough static in the board to short it with no additional power). Move the jumper to pins 2 and 3 for ~2-3 seconds then return it to the original place and plug in and turn on

If this is successful then your back in business (however you may have to play with the bios settings to get it to recognise drives and peripherals again) else goto (4)

4) Remove the bios back-up battery (the big silver watch style battery) for around 10 minutes and then replace it switch on and see what happens. as with option 3 you may need to reset the bios setting as they will be restored to factory defaults.

If this works then yippee if not then try option (5). HOWEVER this should only be tried by a trained professional!!!!!

5) Find the biggest hammer you own and beat the **** out of the motherboard as it is completely dead and at least you can vent your anger before buying a replacement and having to set it up!

Hope this is of use.