OK this has nothing to do with Magicjack but I thought I'd post here because (quite frankly) there are some really smart people here. This has to do with an older computer that was mine but passed on to my wife. I installed a new motherboard today and am having some issues so maybe someone has experienced something similar.
The computer is a homebuilt rig with a AMD Athlon 1800+ XP processor and the motherboard I installed was a PC Chips m848a. Its pretty hard to find older mobos now a days so thats what I settled on and she didn't want to upgrade.
So the problem:
The computer on firstboot had a power supply problem to the hard drive so I had to shut down and use another connector. That solved that and the computer now boots. So the hitch is that I can't restart or shut down and restart without turning off the rear power switch on the power supply. During a reboot the computer appears to start, CD drives flash but the light on the monitor nevers turns green, just stays yellow. So I have to flip the rear power, count to 10 and try again. Then she boots up fine. Thinking about flashing the BIOS but maybe someone has an idea I can try.
Thanks for any help.
Oh running XP Home SP2, 1 gb RAM, 40 g HD a CD ROM and DVD burner. Nothing fancy then she likes solitaire and jigsaw puzzles...
Also even if I shut down from Windows and attempt to restart without hitting that power switch it still won't boot.
Just curious, but is this a clean install of XP after you put the new mobo in? or did you just put the hard drive in and let plug and play do its thing?
check your PS. add up all the components and see if your PS has enough watts to support. try an online power calc, i.e. http://www.vbutils.com/power.asp
why did you have to change the plug on the hard drive? Was it not plugged in, or not functional when plugged in, that would give you a big clue, if it was not functional from the PS..
I got around this before by setting jumpers to DELAY the spin up of the drives, if my PS (power supply) was not functioning properly, but you would have to check the specs on the drive to see if this option exists. I use mostly SCSI drives, so it's just a jumper that get's shorted.
good luck, could be many other things, but this has been the most frequent problem on my early builds.
No fresh install just put the hard drive back in. The power plug on this drive had pulled a pin out when I disconnected it from the drive and I just used a a different plug. The power supply on this rig was sufficient for the old mobo which actually had higher specs than the new board. A few times that I've tried to boot this computer its told me that my CMOS settings were wrong and complained that the CMOS battery was low. I suspect that I may need to change that battery and think I'll change the IDE cable just for something to try. It wouldn't boot this morning so I cleared the CMOS, but still no boot, so I had to leave and when I came back its suddenly up and running...
I wish she would have sprung for some upgrading but she wants to pull out 1000+ for a laptop so.........
The motherboard has either ACPI (new boards) or APM power management which controls power ON, OFF, Restart through OS. If these ACPI/APM drivers are missing (not correctly installed) then you would have trouble restarting or shut down from within Windows.
Try to look for any ACPI/APM drivers with yellow exclamation marks in the Device Manager/System Devices and reinstall them. You can open Device Manager either by:
1. right-click on My Computer/Properties/Hardware tab/Device Manager
or
2. Control Panel/System/Hardware tab/Device Manager
I have already checked for any device problems and see none. I replaced the mobo battery and tried a new IDE cable but still no change. When I first booted up after changing battery and cable it no longer complained about a low battery but still said that CMOS setting were wrong and CMOS size was wrong. It asked to either enter setup or load optimal settings and continue. I choose the latter and no boot. So I resart and enter setup checking the BIOS, no apparent problems, save settings and continue ... no boot. I shutdown using the rear power button, count to 10 and try again, computer boots fine.....
Prolly gonna have the wife call Newegg and see about a swap out on this board....
Sounds like a bad ps, if you had problems with one molex but not another that points to a bad rail in the ps. Bad rail usually is the tip of the iceberg. I had a ps in my tower that had a similar problem it would not turn on unless you unplugged it and let it sit for 15min then started up the second you plugged it in. Would run perfect until the next shut down.
Either way a new Ps is ~40 at office depot and they sell ps testers for 20. The best part is you can return it if it's not the power supply and just skip buying a tester if you are that unsure.
I am not convinced its a power supply issue or I would have mentioned it... he isnt describing a typical PS failure.
LikeMagic wrote:The motherboard has either ACPI (new boards) or APM power management which controls power ON, OFF, Restart through OS. If these ACPI/APM drivers are missing (not correctly installed) then you would have trouble restarting or shut down from within Windows.
You were reading my mind .... Thats exactly why I asked whether he did a fresh XP install or just plugged in the hard drive after replacing the motherboard..... The latter will likely hose the power management - especially if the two mobos are very different. I dont know any way to fix it aside from re-installing XP. I prefer clean. You will spend more time usually tinkering than a clean install would cost you in time and Windows likes to be rebuilt after some years anyway.
You can put in the XP disk and try to do a REINSTALL over the existing installation if you like and see what you get.... its been a while but I dont know about whether that will actually reinstall the power management... otherwise, its best to just back up your data and install clean. XP will then put the proper power management for your new mobo.
I have a new 500W power supply I'm gonna try just to check, if not I may try a clean install, of course we all know how much FUN that is...but actually the two boards seem to have used the same BIOS and even though they were different Chinese boards they were fairly similar. Browsing the internet hasn't given me anything to go on yet so maybe a clean install may be called for....
Jacksondale wrote:I have a new 500W power supply I'm gonna try just to check, if not I may try a clean install, of course we all know how much FUN that is...but actually the two boards seem to have used the same BIOS and even though they were different Chinese boards they were fairly similar. Browsing the internet hasn't given me anything to go on yet so maybe a clean install may be called for....
You never know until its fixed. Like everyone on here, its a guess.... additionally if you had a second hard drive, you could put it in, try a clean install, and if it didnt fix it, you could easily go back to the old install and keep troubleshooting. It would save you time on updates, service packs, etc... you would know after the install if it fixed it.
My money is on new XP though. I guess I have done it so many times I just dont feel like its that big of a deal... most of it is unattended so in my second hard drive scenario you would be troubleshooting with the option to stay clean if it fixed it. Ghost it to the original drive if its your preference of drives to use, or just use the second to grab your data and use it as a second backup drive. I use Syncback from 2brightsparks.com (freeware) for automated backups across my network and second drive backups... its a great app.
Well maybe its just the Law Of 48's as the system has suddenly stabilized and been booting just fine for the last couple of days.... Reading an article at PC Mag on troubleshooting Mobo's the writer states that often a new system will run very unstable and either fail or stabilize and run fine for life of system. So lesson for system builders, let it run a while.
Thanks for the replies though peeps and I'm really glad I didn't have to reinstall that OS....
Jacksondale wrote:Well maybe its just the Law Of 48's as the system has suddenly stabilized and been booting just fine for the last couple of days.... Reading an article at PC Mag on troubleshooting Mobo's the writer states that often a new system will run very unstable and either fail or stabilize and run fine for life of system. So lesson for system builders, let it run a while.
Thanks for the replies though peeps and I'm really glad I didn't have to reinstall that OS....
Exactly
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Jacksondale wrote:OK this has nothing to do with Magicjack but I thought I'd post here because (quite frankly) there are some really smart people here.
Sorry haven't even read your post yet, but wanted to say THANK YOU for putting it in the proper section. That's what the Lounge is for, anything off-topic from the rest of the forum.
Again THANK YOU!!!!
Morpheus: What is "coming soon"? How do you define "coming soon"?
Jacksondale wrote:OK this has nothing to do with Magicjack but I thought I'd post here because (quite frankly) there are some really smart people here.
Sorry haven't even read your post yet, but wanted to say THANK YOU for putting it in the proper section. That's what the Lounge is for, anything off-topic from the rest of the forum.
Again THANK YOU!!!!
you are clearly a post whore and trying to catch up with kumar
Jacksondale wrote:OK this has nothing to do with Magicjack but I thought I'd post here because (quite frankly) there are some really smart people here.
Sorry haven't even read your post yet, but wanted to say THANK YOU for putting it in the proper section. That's what the Lounge is for, anything off-topic from the rest of the forum.
Again THANK YOU!!!!
you are clearly a post whore and trying to catch up with kumar
Chyea... at least i try to help **most of the times** hehe
peace
kumar
LikeMagic wrote:Man, I liked it more when you had your "EX" title: "Post Who^^"
Hahah oh well.... May be its inappropriate for those young people on the forum (heh).
Well finally done a project due tomorrow 11:25 EST signing off for a few hours of sleep:-p
peace
Kumar
maybe instead of "Post who^^" it could be "Dan needs to replace himself with me" or "MagicJack CEO".
Something clean yet funny. "P.W." was probably a little bit over the top as I'm sure there are family-minded folks here.
Morpheus: What is "coming soon"? How do you define "coming soon"?
SpamBox wrote:maybe instead of "Post who^^" it could be "Dan needs to replace himself with me" or "MagicJack CEO".
Something clean yet funny. "P.W." was probably a little bit over the top as I'm sure there are family-minded folks here.
Jacksondale wrote:OK this has nothing to do with Magicjack but I thought I'd post here because (quite frankly) there are some really smart people here. This has to do with an older computer that was mine but passed on to my wife. I installed a new motherboard today and am having some issues so maybe someone has experienced something similar.
The computer is a homebuilt rig with a AMD Athlon 1800+ XP processor and the motherboard I installed was a PC Chips m848a. Its pretty hard to find older mobos now a days so thats what I settled on and she didn't want to upgrade.
So the problem:
The computer on firstboot had a power supply problem to the hard drive so I had to shut down and use another connector. That solved that and the computer now boots. So the hitch is that I can't restart or shut down and restart without turning off the rear power switch on the power supply. During a reboot the computer appears to start, CD drives flash but the light on the monitor nevers turns green, just stays yellow. So I have to flip the rear power, count to 10 and try again. Then she boots up fine. Thinking about flashing the BIOS but maybe someone has an idea I can try.
Thanks for any help.
Oh running XP Home SP2, 1 gb RAM, 40 g HD a CD ROM and DVD burner. Nothing fancy then she likes solitaire and jigsaw puzzles...
Also even if I shut down from Windows and attempt to restart without hitting that power switch it still won't boot.
I scanned over this whole topic and was not sure if you had solved this issue before the crab infestation took place. One of my first suggestions would have been to clear cmos but you effectively accomplished this when you changed the battery.
I love homegrown, so I have always built my own systems over the years and have seen lots of peculiar behavior among various combinations of hardware. That said, my first advice would be not to rely on "Cable select" jumpered block devices. Instead, hard-jumper these devices appropriately.
Also, you mentioned re-flashing the bios. By all means do this with the latest if not last issued bios from the MB manufacturer. This brings up another point as well. Very often there can be more than one source for bios and driver upgrades. One source being the chip-set manufacturer, and the other being the Mobo manufacturer. Check both sources for the latest code.
Last but not least I would always suggest reverting to a minimal system, and assuming it's working add optional hardware a piece at a time.
WIN_55,212-2 My new best friend on the recreational playground. It's a gas!
Reading an article at PC Mag on troubleshooting Mobo's the writer states that often a new system will run very unstable and either fail or stabilize and run fine for life of system. So lesson for system builders, let it run a while.
