Well, I'm back from a two week computer reprieve. Granted, it wasn't voluntary. But I did learn something about computer hardware, which was a plus (and got some drawing done to boot, check out my other blog).
I had to replace the CMOS battery (it's the giant watch battery looking thing on the motherboard, which maintains the system clock and bios settings when there's no power going to the computer). I have another tower and mobo here (but they don't work right), and figured I'd use that battery. Turns out that battery was worse than the one currently in my machine.
Well, the power switch on my comp has been broken for some time now, so since my computer wouldn't boot up, I figured I'd switch the mobo and hardware into the working tower, and use the old battery for now until I could get a new one. Well, I switched it all over (except for the power supply. I used the one that was already in the tower) and it wouldn't start at ALL. Namely, the power supply wouldn't even start up. That sucked. So I switched the power supply with the old one (at least I knew that one worked), and it did start up, but the computer wouldn't boot. Everything was in perfectly, except the connections to the power and reset switches (and the LED's). Keep in mind, I have almost NO hardware experience at all. In fact, I hate messing with the hardware. My friend in 97 gave me his old 386 computer, which didn't work well (but it at least booted up). So I decided to explore it. I uninstalled the drives, then reinstalled it. After that, it wouldn't boot at all. That started my hardware phobia.
Even when I first got my new computer, they gypped me on the sound card. But I had a generous friend who won some money in the lottery, and her first (and only) thought was to share it with her friends, so she bought me a sound card. I REALLY didn't want to open up my computer and install it. But my other friend, the only one who I knew had any computer know-how, refused to do it and made me do it myself. Fortunately, it worked out alright. (In fact, I am STILL using that same sound card). But a few months later, I desperately needed a RAM upgrade. I bought the chip, but wound up paying $40 to CompUSA to have them install it. A few years later I discovered how dirt simple it is, and regretted that I could have spent the extra money on more RAM. I've since done some minor harware tweaking (like installing new drives and PCI cards and whatnot), but nothing major. Certainly no motherboard and/or power supply installations. I didn't even know exactly where on the mobo the hard drive ribbon cable was supposed to go!
Back to the story: The thing with my comp is the power switches and LED's are connected to a mini-ribbon cable, so I need only plug it into one set of jumpers on the mobo, and it takes care of the rest (namely, specific placement). The other tower I have here, has all the switches on their own little wires with jumpers at the end. And the demarcation on the mobo didn't specify which leads to plug them into. I believe this is why I failed.
So I took the arduous task of re-installing everything back into my old tower, where the switch was broken, but I knew at least just turning on the power button on my surge protector would boot it up (don't worry, it still shuts down normally). And I did. And it rebooted, but only up to the memory check. Then it stopped. The keyboard was still responsive, but I couldn't even enter setup mode.
So I'm without a computer for 2 weeks, until my sister can get the battery. She does, finally, and I replace it. So confident that at least that part is adequate, I set about trying to get the computer to boot fully. I remember reading about "jumper recovery/config" some time ago when I was doing some very basic research on mobo's. Basically, in mobo's that have jumper settings, you can remove them all and start up to 'reset' the bios (don't take my word on it, I'm sure different mobo's have different preferences. So if you do pull out all the jumpers and your mobo fries, I cannot be held liable).
Mine is a jumperless mobo, but it has one bios jumper. So I pulled it (it was marked on the mobo what each setting does) for 'recover'. Started, and no video. Then I turned it off, and set the jumper to the 'configuration' setting. This time it booted into config mode. Yeah! Getting somewhere! So I reset the bios info (and clock), and it did have one hardware conflict: It didn't like the sound card in PCI slot 2 for some reason. So I put it in slot 1, and it had no problem with that. And now it works. YEAH!
And I feel that I'm very close to being able to build a comp from scratch (just have to learn how to seat a processor chip and heat sink). Something I wouldn't have had the confidence to do before this ordeal.
