"Here I sit; all broken-hearted..."

[Hangtime]

Ordered myself a new pile of parts to build a machine with last week.. my tired old PII/466 was just NOT gonna make it thru this next revison, so I bit the bullet and called MoBo Express...

Componets arrived Friday afternoon... and I went right to work. 2 hours later, the new beast spoke it's first... "beep. beep. (pause) beep."

"Ruh roh.. I mumble.. sounds like a bios failure.." I strip the necessary parts outta the new beast, re-initialise the old one and go to the SuperMicro site fer the bios download... two hours later; I've got the new boy up and running but begin grumbling over repeated registry issues in win98. I go back thru the CMOS and the bios.. nope. Nothin definite; but I get this sneaky suspicion that there's a memory fault.. so saturday dawns and I'm off to the local computer bristo for some new memory. I have at this point installed W98 and subsequently reformated the HD 11 times.

2 bags of doritos, a stale sack of oreo's and a hunnered smackers later the local C-Geek hooks me up with some RAM (even had the geek plug it into a new machine there and boot it up to be sure it was ok) and home I go and start again......

"beep. Beep. (pause) Beep" ARRRRRRGH! It's the Mobo. A SuperMicro SSA3770, Intel 815e chipset.. nice board.. toast. And it only took 24 total tries to convince me it just wasn't gonna let me load Windoze...  

Here I sit, broken hearted: built a new machine, but it only farted. So; now I'm waitin on a replacement MoBo (be here tomorrow) and I swear; if this one beeps I'm gonna...  well... I dunno.. but it won't be pleasant. Hairball started packin on Saturday. I offered to drive...  

Hang

[bojc]

Know how ya feel hang,

Had a new cable modem installed at home today and while they were doing it they downloaded and installed version 1.05.

sitting at work dying to go home and try it and the new version  and the Wife calls and says "Honey, lets go to the mall as soon as you get home, the christmas tree ornaments are on sale"

Arrrghhhh!!! HJ give me a beer.............

[Wanker]

I was gonna say that yer old RAM dimms were not seated properly. I see that you bought some new RAM, but have you tried re-seating  the old ones, eh?

That beeping upon bootup is a classic case of unseated RAM dimms.

[Hangtime]

Rgr that banana. Was my first reaction to the beep-code. Reseated the DIMMS, retried; moved the DIMMS, retried; then replaced the DIMMS and tried again.

What tipped me to resident memory issues on the board was the loss of the bios.. when CMOS got reset by jumpers the BIOS was GONE!~!

Checked with MoBo Express first thing this A.M.. ran thru the entire sequence of failures and rechecks.. they agree. I even swapped out the lithium batt on the MoBo. They are hot-shipping at no charge another MoBo.. great service on their part. SuperMicro has always been my preferred MoBo brand, they've always been rock solid for me.. first time I ever even heard of an issue with a SuperMicro board. Oh well.. if it wern't fer bad luck; guess I'd have none at all.  

Thanks fer the advice tho!

Hang

   

[milnko]

Seems I remember the last time you used that Thread title I stole the thread with:

"Here I sit all Broken Hearted, tried to Sh*t, but only Farted!"

Thought I'd try to hijack the thread again to see if I could  

Anyhow, hope ya git er together soon, I know it's a squeak to have the parts mostly there. I hadda to buy a new MOBO not long after buyin' a NEW MOBO, because I tried to FLASH the BIOS, and somehow got it wrong, couldn't even git er to boot up...........man  I was grounded fer a week on that fiasco.


------------------
"Find your enemy and shoot him down - everything else is unimportant"
-WW1 German ACE Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen

<< MILENKO >>
ACES HIGH ASSASSINS Website
WB/AH ASSASSINS Website

[Duckwing6]

I hear ya Hang .. i just got yselfe a new Geforce and i have to bring it back to the shop .. because after 3 days of random lockups, a completre rebuild of my system i'm now finally convinced that it's NOT compatible with the fediddleing VIA chipset .. but such is life  

Hope you're more lucky with your new MoBo !

Cheers
DW6

[blitz]

Hossa hang,

build me a new one 3 month ago. All was fine until i tried to install my soundcard montego 1.
Total Crash;took out that sc - machine booted fine but monitor was black as hell.
After hours + hours of workin on this puppy i found out that monitor has gone south + soundcard wasn't able to work w new mainboard
PCI-bus version. %/($§"=?$"/!$"??

blitz

PS. New monitor + soundcard now too-- man that was an expencive upgrade ;(

[Mark Luper]

Hang,
Like you I like the SuperMicro boards too. Been running them for several years. Your registry problems sounded like memory to me too because that is what happened to me when I upgraded to a 933. Bought the sale memory and had to go back for the good stuff. My new upgrade is running on a Soyo mb, never heard of em but the sale price for it and the boxed 933 processor at $399 sounded too good for me to pass up. Just did my upgrade Saturday. Works great, first time I never had a problem with a upgrade other than the cheap memory I bought. Hope to see ya up soon bud...

[Ice]

I'm not gettin nothin new....Whaaaaaaaa!


 


Ice

[Westy]

"old PII/466 was just NOT gonna make it thru this next revison"

 It's sufferable      Large, heavy action battles around the fleets can kill me a bit but my PII333 still chugs along nicely. I do have an Abit board and PIII 600E standing by for the swap out this week though.  If I didn'y need my old MB and PII 333 I'd donate it to someone. Not that it would do them much good anyway.

  -Westy

[Lephturn]

Usually in the manual for your mainboard, there is a chart that will tell you what the board is trying to say with that particular beep sequence.  It could be memory... or it could be that it is not detecting a video card.  I have had both of those problems before.  See if you can find the beepcodes.

BTW, I think it was MicroStar? who was building some boards with little LED number displays on them so they would tell you the problem when it wouldn't post properly.  Very cool.

------------------
Lephturn - Chief Trainer
A member of The Flying Pigs  http://www.flyingpigs.com
 
"A pig is a jolly companion, Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt --
A pig is a pal, who'll boost your morale, Though mountains may topple and tilt.
When they've blackballed, bamboozled, and burned you, When they've turned on you, Tory and Whig,
Though you may be thrown over by Tabby and Rover, You'll never go wrong with a pig, a pig,
You'll never go wrong with a pig!" -- Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"

[Eagler]

Easiest upgrade ever!
Flashed BIOS to handle new CPU. Pulled out the P3 500 and dropped in the P3 800. Pulled the two 64 mb ram chips and dropped in the two 128's. Fired up the old Abit BE6, jumped into SoftMenu for the cpu speed change and WALAH! Did the same cpu switch in the son's (400 P2 to my old 500 P3) and wife's computer (Celeron 333 to son's old 400 P2) (they all benefit from my upgrades ) and everyone was up and running in less than an hour. Abit boards are the best in my experience. I order them from Tccomputers at www.tccomputers.com.  Fast, friendly and reliable.

Eagler

[Trell]

..

[This message has been edited by Trell (edited 12-27-2000).]

[Tac]

Hmm.. reseat the video card too. 3 beeps of that kind can be either bad ram or video card problem (I really have to hear it myself to hear which is which).

Also, check (and re-plug) all connections to devices. Try unplugging cards and testing out the boot proccess as well, sometimes there is a modem or sound card that feks up the motherboard due to incompatibility.

Good luck bud, let us know if you get it running!

-Tac-
(Gateway Computer Technician... Advising you NOT to buy Gateway computers!)

[This message has been edited by Tac (edited 12-27-2000).]

[Hangtime]

Thanks guys.. I have the beep codes.. in fact; when it beeped instead of booting I smiled. Have been down this road before, as I have built every damn machine in this company as well as my own 'home' beasties.

Two beeps.. BIOS absent (duh)
One beep.. memory refresh circutry on the MoBo faulty. When I got that, I knew the board was bad.. but just to play safe I did a DIMM swap; slot swap; and even pulled the cards all out and ran it up bare bellybutton naked (no vid or sound card, Mobo has on board support for both)

Gotta say; that flashing a new BIOS 'blind' (no video, so no prompts) was kinda fun.. hell, damn good thing I cut my teeth on machines runnin DOS.  

GOOD NEWS!! fedX just handed me the new board.. when I get home from work tonight; guess what I'm gonna be doin!  

Thanks again for all the help and pointers guys!

Hang