No screen output

[Lionel]

I'll tell the full story of everything I know.

I built/upgraded my machine about 6 months ago. The only components I
kept was a Seagate 80 gig sata drive, 40 gig WD pata drive and a pioneer
dvd re-writer.

About half a dozen times since building the machine I have experience
complete freezes. Screen ouput remains the same but just absolutely no
response. I would switch off by holding the power button in. On one or
two occasions I had to turn off at the wall to boot again. In the last
few days the freezing and misbehaviour has happened a few times more
than usual.

Finally today the monitor wouldn't come to life after going into suspend
(or whatever it is). I did a cold shutdown but when I restarted I got no
screen output. I got the normal beep noise, and I heard the hard drive
sounding like it went through the full boot process, further supported
by the fact that when I hit the power button it sounded like it went
through the full shutdown process. I repeated this several times.

When I start up I notice the light on the monitor change from flashing
red to green.

I have tried pulling out all the memory and got the expected beeping
complaints from the mobo.

I would appreciate any ideas.

Thanks

Lionel.

 

[Lionel]

Lionel wrote:

BTW, I just tried removing the battery. Now when I try to boot I get 2
beeps that sound just like the normal beeps and are about 2 seconds
apart. It doesn't sound like it is booting anymore .

It's an Asus m2n-vm dvi board.

Thanks

Lionel.

 

[Gerard Bok]

Lionel wrote:

BTW, I just tried removing the battery. Now when I try to boot I get 2
beeps that sound just like the normal beeps and are about 2 seconds
apart. It doesn't sound like it is booting anymore .

If you could, it would probably read something along the lines of
"your configuration has changed. Press F2 to enter setup"

 

[Gerard Bok]

I'll tell the full story of everything I know.

I built/upgraded my machine about 6 months ago. The only components I
kept was a Seagate 80 gig sata drive, 40 gig WD pata drive and a pioneer
dvd re-writer.

About half a dozen times since building the machine I have experience
complete freezes. Screen ouput remains the same but just absolutely no
response. I would switch off by holding the power button in. On one or
two occasions I had to turn off at the wall to boot again. In the last
few days the freezing and misbehaviour has happened a few times more
than usual.

Finally today the monitor wouldn't come to life after going into suspend
(or whatever it is). I did a cold shutdown but when I restarted I got no
screen output. I got the normal beep noise, and I heard the hard drive
sounding like it went through the full boot process, further supported
by the fact that when I hit the power button it sounded like it went
through the full shutdown process. I repeated this several times.

Press Alt F4. If the machine shuts down, Windows was running

When I start up I notice the light on the monitor change from flashing
red to green.

I have tried pulling out all the memory and got the expected beeping
complaints from the mobo.

I would appreciate any ideas.

- Suspect the powersupply. (Don't trust voltage values as
reported by Windows applications or BIOS.)
- Carefully look at the BIOS parameters. Choose 'fail safe' and
watch. Inspect the parameters BIOS uses and compare them to the
parts you installed. (Especially: memory speed.)
- Strip down the machine to the bare essentials. (No more than
one harddisk; no CD, unless you want to test the machine without
any harddisks.)
- Run something that is simple to watch. And detects failure
Memtest86 comes to mind

 

[Lionel]

Thanks to both responses. Since I really didn't have the necessary
equipment I took it back to the shop. I took back only the new
components which consisted of case + PSU, mobo, ram and CPU, enough to
get life . They rang up today to say that they had fixed it by
updating the bios. Well, they didn't actually write down what the
symptoms were when I took it in, so the guy fixing it somehow thought it
was recognising hard drives and that is now fixed, $70 for the trouble.

Anyway, this alarmed me, I slapped myself in the head when I realised I
could test my monitor on my laptop . . . sob sob sob, monitor is dead!

Responses follow below:

If it is becoming more frequent it would tend to suggest a
progressively failing part like the motherboard or PSU.
Having to turn it off at the wall tends to suggest PSU. You
have not mentioned the specific PSU, is it relatively new or
did you also reuse it, and is it a known quality brand or a
generic?

It's a fairly cheap Asus case. Could the problem possibly have resided
in the BIOS? Perhaps the update will have helped.

This might be a monitor fault, and might be a different
fault from what has caused your freezing described above.
When it happens, disconnect the monitor from AC then plug it
back in and turn on.

Appears you are probably right, which means that the problem is probably
going to return, which is going to be a problem as it is hard to
reproduce in the shop.

If you have a multimeter, take voltage measurements of the
PSU.

I don't, but if I can get one how can this be done (I can probably
google it)?

Thanks

Lionel.