I learned a few things recently (that’s my positive way of looking at the situation). I decided to give my old computer–the one I think I fried the motherboard on–a chance at a new life. I bought a new motherboard for it as I figured it was worth a try to save the other components in the machine. I ordered a BioStar P4M80-M4 MicroATX board for just $50 which made it worth it.

After removing the previous motherboard and installing the new BioStar one we were stumped for a bit. The machine wouldn’t boot. Things seemed to power up for a split second (e.g. fans, etc.) and immediately died. We tried all kinds of things which eventually led to disconnecting everything (HDs, CD/DVD-roms, floppy, case fans, etc.) but still no luck. Then we realized it had an on-board video card so we got rid of the old video card and made significant progress as it would now seem to power up with no end in sight but it still didn’t do anything. It was exhibiting the same exact behavior the old motherboard was at this point (which makes me wonder if the old mobo is in fact toast or not).

We continued to try different things but no dice until the next morning when Meg decided to swap the two memory sticks with two others we had laying around. This worked and we were really happy to finally see the boot sequence show up on the display.

Then we noticed we hadn’t completely succeeded yet as it was in an infinite loop. It would do the POST sequence over and over again and never really get to the Windows install on the hard drive. I figured it might have something to do with the fact that the motherboard had been switched on Windows. We tried booting off a Windows XP Setup CD and reinstalled it from scratch. The machine was fully functioning at this point. Finally.

Some things we learned from this exercise:

  • Some motherboards, at least the one mentioned above, need to have memory installed to boot. We had tried it with the two memory sticks it, for some reason, doesn’t like and completely without memory. Both yielded the same results where the machine would power up but no boot process of any kind took place.
    • The strange part is that those two other memory sticks worked on the two other machines we had in our house that were compatible with that type of memory. The Biostar board just doesn’t like them whatsoever. I’ll try to investigate the specs a bit more soon.
  • If your machine seems to power on for just a split second after you press the power switch, try removing the video card. Once we did that, it powered the machine continuously instead of instantly shutting off.
    • We have yet to try the video card on another machine to see if it’s truly dead or again just exhibiting some pickiness on the part of the motherboard.
  • MicroATX boards work very well within ATX cases. This I did not know previously and almost bought a new case and power supply based on my assumption. We ended up only having to move one of the spacers on the case to align with all the screw holes on the board. We also had to swap out the back panel but that I knew was going to be the case and isn’t hard at all.
  • Rosewill power supplies are very nice. We used a Rosewill RP500S-2MK and it’s modular cable management system absolutely rocks. It’s also very, very quiet which is nice.