On Sat, 25 Mar 2000, tom carlile wrote:
>
> a new stick of "unregistered" 128M pc133 ram later, a new case
> with a highend power supply with power regulation, sans ide drives
> in turn for a scsi controller and a scsi drive -- i am still unable to
> boot. now i can't even get into the BIOS, when i turn it on i get
> the BIOS splash screen, then a comforting loud siren of beeps
> (looks like i got the speaker wires right) beedoobeedoobeedoo,
> and "Keyboard Error, hit F1 to resume"
RAM has gotten so complicated that I don't know if it makes a difference,
but the ASUS motherboard you have is almost certainly designed for PC100
memory rather than PC133. If the clock speed is just what the stick is
spec'ed at, then this shouldn't be a problem, but my recent foray into
buffered vs. unbuffered / registered vs. unregistered / CAS 2 vs. CAS 4
has radically decreased my confidence in making these determinations.
Here is an important test: after the thing starts beeping at you, when
you hit the power button, does the machine turn itself off? Because of
the way ATX motherboards are designed, if you're having memory problems
the power button (which is actually stateless and just opens and closes a
circuit for ON and OFF) will probably not work. If the power button
doesn't work, you're probably still having a memory problem; if it does
work, then it is more likely that it's something else.
It's highly unlikely that your CPU is bad (OTOH, where did you get it?
Did it come in a box with warranty or did it come in a ziploc bag from
someone who said if fell off the back of the truck and traded it for a bag
of grass?), but have you considered the possibility that you might just
have gotten stuck with a bad MB?
Contact the vendor of the MB and find out how long they had it in stock
before they sold it to you. A stupid vendor trick that I recently got
burned by is (and I won't mention the name of the local vendor, who has
come highly recommended on this list and is NOT Chipsmart) getting a
DRAM that they had in stock for 9 months which obviously was returned as
defective by someone else and just put back on the inventory shelf because
no one felt like doing the RMA. A month goes by, and everyone's forgotten
the part was bad. If the MB you bought has been in their inventory for
more than 1 month, I can almost guarantee that you got a defective board
which was returned by someone else.
> deja.com revealed all the definitions of the k7m beeps, an annoying
> siren was not listed. i've tried switching keyboards with another
> (both of these are fine keyboards, i use them daily), same thing.
> i've double checked jumpers power connectors, etc.
>
it can't be the keyboard anyway. All modern boards are designed for
systems which can be used without keyboards (for rackmount and headless
server systems, for example).
> i'd love some ideas people, this is an old problem and am about
> to just pay someone to get this out of my hair so i can get back
> to work. beer and pizza to the man who gets me up and running.
>
First try the simple power button test mentioned above. Then:
Take everything which is not essential to booting the machine (sound
cards, CDROM/CDR/RW, SCSI stuff, hard disk, ethernet card) out of the box.
All you need to boot the machine is the MB, the CPU, DRAM (one stick), one
floppy drive, and a video card. Plug in a keyboard for good measure and
attach a monitor to the video card so that you can see what's going on in
the off chance that the thing posts, but it shouldn't matter.
If you continue to get a beep code, it has to be one of these 5 items (and
it's not likely to be the floppy). Now swap them out, one item at a time
until the problem goes away. Since it sounds like you haven't tried
messing with the video card yet, try taking this out and seeing what
happens. If you have a spare video card or one which can be pulled out of
another machine, try using this. If another video card doesn't solve the
problem, it has to be either the CPU, the MB or the DRAM. End of story.
Good luck. A machine which won't post is a f*cking pain in the ass, no
doubt. I've been there oh so many times.
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