Motherboard Freakout

[excitron]

I recently built a system around a DFI Lan Party Pro 875B board, and it's been doing some strange things within the past few days.

First, I started the system up and I get a two-tone audio signal and the system hung. I pressed the reboot button and the system booted up normally. Next time I started up, the same thing happened, but when I pressed the reboot button, the reboot came up with the following message:

Award Bootblock BIOS V1.0
BIOS checksum error
Detecting floppy drive A media
Insert system disk and press enter

Not knowing what else to do, I put a Win 98SE boot floppy in the machine and Igot a message that read:

Automatic load awardflash.exe
!!Error - awardflash.exe not found!!
Replace the disk and press enter

Realizing what it was asking for, I downloaded and made a flash disk and let it do it's thing. I then rebooted and things came back.

Then I was working on the system when it suddenly dropped dead. Screen black, end of statement (the system was still up and running, it just went blank). I rebooted and I get the same error message as above. I reinstalled the BIOS update and rebooted, but it just keeps asking for the same thing.

Any clues? The system is based on a 3.2 gig Prescott with the supplied fan (not overclocked), 4 512 meg Geil Golden Dragon ram, an Antec Truepower 480 PS, ATI FireGL T2 128 card, 80 gig Maxtor primary and 2 160 gig Maxtors in a two-drive RAID array secondary.

Thanks for any help with this.

 

[Crashman]

Normally I'd guess a fried power supply, but you have such a big one, I'd have to guess again probably. It could be a damaged board. It definately sounds like something is fried.

I'd try removing all the stuff you don't need from the system just to get it to run. That is, I'd try running it with just 1 hard drive, no optical drives, 1 stick of RAM, etc, just to see if it can run normally again.

Of course there's a chance you'll have to reset BIOS in order to get it to boot, there should be a jumper for that and it might be labled "CLR_CMOS" or a similar name.

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[jihiggs]

you tried purging the bios? im just shooting blanks here.

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[excitron]

>>That is, I'd try running it with just 1 hard drive, no optical drives, 1 stick of RAM, etc, just to see if it can run normally again.<<

I can't see how drives would have any bearing on this. I'd almost suspect the ram or the CPU, but the fact that the system just drops out into this BIOS update mode tells me the motherboard is the problem. Also, after I've shut the system off for a while (power off at the PS), it starts up normal again, only to drop out again at some point down the road. I happen to have an identical motherboard, I'm just going to replace it and see what happens.

 

[Crashman]

Disconnecting the drives would reduce the load on the power supply, just on the off chance that's the problem.

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