On 13 Sep 2006 17:53:59 -0700, "Bertie"
wrote:


Thought I would get bios beep code if battery failing?

Not necessarily.



Do you have a lot of USB stuff plugged in? If so, see if
it's jumpered to 5V or 5VSB, and if 5VSB, change to 5V.
Also try unplugging some of that USB stuff, and if that
isn't enough (nothing else helps) try unplugging all other
things nonessential towards getting it to POST, then add
back the HDD and see if it'll boot (Windows?).

It was after unplugging all the usb stuff that it started last time but
I thought that just a coincidence?

Maybe, or maybe not... which is why I mentioned it.



How would you know what it sees if it's not even posting?

The pc posted and started windows at the 6th attempt. Then I attempted
to try the floppy drive as it had not appeared in 'My Computer' since
pc first started after receiving initial Bios rom checksum error. Even
though the floppy was now appearing among the other drives it would not
recognise any diskette.

The floppy drive should be considered an unknown variable
and removed from the system (unplugged from PSU and data
cable). You might try the drive on another system, or
another drive on that system, but for the time being you
might as well make further attempts on the system without a
floppy drive connected, unless you want to pursue flashing
the bios, but be cautious about doing that because if the
system is instable while it's being flashed, you could then
end up with bios corruption even if you didn't have any in
the first place.





Ok, but it's quite possible the system shipped with a newer
bios than was on the CD- the CDs get made in a run to ship
with later board revisions, but generally they may flash the
newest bios available at the time (of doing it). Your board
EEPROM "might" have a sticker on it suggesting which bios
version it shipped with, and you might try that version, but
frankly I'd be just as likely to get the newest (non-beta)
bios from the board manufacturer, particularly if the
current bios was prone to corruption... but again, I don't
think that is your problem, I doubt it's a bios problem at
all.

Okay so you reckon its my CPU or MoBo at fault I'll get the info
tomorrow if I can find it

No, I never suggested it was the CPU at fault. If your fan
had failed, or the 'sink clogged with dust and system had
been repeatedly tried until CPU was overheating, THEN the
CPU might cause such a problem but so long as the heatsink
didn't fall off you should not have a problem with the CPU
from a cold start- if the CPU were failing you wouldn't be
able to run the system on the attempts that did succeed.



... if it has DOS? IMO, easier to just burn a CDR that
boots dos on another system, IF you cant' get a USB drive to
work.

Well I was under the impression that usb wouldn't work from a dos
enviroment only from within Windows? Can you tell me how to do this
from dos.

The board bios may support USB booting. If it does, you try
it... and if it doesn't, don't. If you don't know, you
might as well try it, after checking the bios for settings
to boot USB *devices* and perhaps enabling USB legacy
support (might be worded a bit differently).

Some systems have a buggy boot-from-USB implementation in
the bios such that you might have best chance if unplug the
system from AC power, plug in the USB drive, then restore AC
power, THEN power on the system... not just plugging in the
USB drive while AC power is still connected.

You'd have to have the USB drive set up to be bootable of
course, and overall it might be easier to just use a
bootable CDR if you aren't familiar with booting USB. If
you boot the USB drive, there is no DOS support for USB
needed, because the bios handles it.


Is it del key on post to enter cmos setup and change boot options?

How can we know when we don't know what board it is?
yes DEL is often the key to press, but if that doesn't
work, try the F% (function) keys.


Problem is my pc only posts occasionally when attempt restart is there
anyway to get into these options while windows running?

Frankly, I wouldn't be running windows at all, because the
system is in an unknown state at this point and it may start
corrupting files, at which point you may have two loosely
related problems but with the original problem resolved the
2nd would still persist- making it more difficult to
distinguish whether the system was operating properly from a
hardware standpoint, or if it had instead just degraded
further.