Everything is dark

[Warpspasm]

I posted this in the Systems area under Compaq, but after I thought about it for a while, I decided to post it here. It really wasn't getting much traffic over there and this part of the forum is where I'm most familiar.

Anyway, my son turned on his Presario last night and the monitor power light came on, as did the power light on the front of the PC case. The monitor never actually displayed anything. We tried rebooting, checking all the wires etc, but nothing worked. I plugged the monitor into my PC and it displayed to POST screen before I shut it off. I plugged it back into his PC and nothing. I don't think his PC is POSTing because if I push the power button on his PC case it turns off the PC immediately. I experience has been that you normally have to hold in the power button for several seconds to shut off a PC. I can't get into BIOS (or at least I can't SEE if I'm BIOS) because the monitor won't display anything. He has a EVGA6600 graphics card in there and I was hoping to try using the one built into the mobo, to see if it was a graphic card problem.

Any suggestions?

 

[gomerpile]

PSU most likely, is there any beep codes

 

[evongugg]

Clear the bios.

 

[Warpspasm]

The beeps sound like one long, two short.

 

[gomerpile]

a video error has occurred and the BIOS cannot initialize the video screen to display any additional information depending on the bios (award bios)
ami extended memory

 

[Warpspasm]

So, does that indicate a video card failure or motherboard failure?

 

[gomerpile]

which bios award or ami

 

[Warpspasm]

Don't know that one. Too bad I can't see it when it posts.

 

[gomerpile]

Ok I'm going to say award the vcard is not working yes the video card or not enough power one or the other,
now if its AMI its the extended ram, no its not the board, but I'm not going to say if the board was the cause of this.

 

[gomerpile]

Ok now what I'd do is use ubcd and there you can test your system using a cheap old pci vcard,
you can also flash your card use nbitor to read your video card bios and test the bios, if all goes well save to floppy and flash it even if its not working. You will need a pci video card.