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Problems rebuilding system



 
 
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  #21  
Old December 14th 19, 09:49 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Norm Why[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 114
Default Problems rebuilding system

You can get a "no beep" condition, by using a
reset button crushed in the ON position. Usually
OEM computer cases are the ones with sufficiently
cheesy buttons on the front of the computer, to
make incidents like this possible. I have one
computer here, where the buttons are such,
I know that some day that's how those buttons
will fail. The buttons speak of cheapness.
Anything mechanical is always suspect. I've been using a couple of
identical Antec cases, not normally noted for being cheap, for computers
now residing in the basement "computer room". Not too long after
purchase (but outside any hope of warranty) the power switch failed on
one of them and drove me crazy for a while. Rather than give up I
swapped the connections between "power" and "reset" on the MB and it has
worked fine for years now. Only real problem is that I can almost never
remember which of the cases has the swapped switches. If I had any sense
I'd apply some masking tape over the dead switch to remind me...


Thanks John. Maybe reassignment of connections is the answer.

Because of propagation delays, the group seems not to have seen my latest
post or

"How-to-connect-case-cables-system-panel."
https://assets.rockpapershotgun.com/...stem-panel.jpg


What is that a picture of ?

It doesn't seem to be your GA-EP45-DS3L.

And the black wiring depicted, is a mistake when
doing builder work. You want classically colored
twisted pairs for each 2-pin thing needing
connections. It makes it easier to get the polarity
right on the first try (for LEDs).

No harm will come from hooking up a two pin pair the
wrong way around. I prefer the color code, because
it tells me "what they had in mind" when they wired it.

Antec in particular, has made mistakes on front panel
wiring more than once. The part I consider weird
about this, is when they do make a mistake, it's *never*
with the VCC pin, never a risk of smoke or fire.
How do they make these mistakes, without ever
involving a "hot" pin ? I could never figure that
part out. If you bring me an Antec case today,
I'll get out my ohmmeter and buzz out the wiring
harness, before using it.

Paul


It is not a picture of my GA-EP45-DS3L. It is other unnamed MOBO. It is a
picture my MX330-X front panel connections. It shows speaker(beep)
connections to pins 18, 14 on unknown MOBO. It would make a beep. But it
still does not solve my problem. I am preparing a customer care support
email to Cougar.


  #22  
Old December 14th 19, 11:45 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Paul[_28_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,467
Default Problems rebuilding system

Norm Why wrote:
You can get a "no beep" condition, by using a
reset button crushed in the ON position. Usually
OEM computer cases are the ones with sufficiently
cheesy buttons on the front of the computer, to
make incidents like this possible. I have one
computer here, where the buttons are such,
I know that some day that's how those buttons
will fail. The buttons speak of cheapness.
Anything mechanical is always suspect. I've been using a couple of
identical Antec cases, not normally noted for being cheap, for computers
now residing in the basement "computer room". Not too long after
purchase (but outside any hope of warranty) the power switch failed on
one of them and drove me crazy for a while. Rather than give up I
swapped the connections between "power" and "reset" on the MB and it has
worked fine for years now. Only real problem is that I can almost never
remember which of the cases has the swapped switches. If I had any sense
I'd apply some masking tape over the dead switch to remind me...
Thanks John. Maybe reassignment of connections is the answer.

Because of propagation delays, the group seems not to have seen my latest
post or

"How-to-connect-case-cables-system-panel."
https://assets.rockpapershotgun.com/...stem-panel.jpg

What is that a picture of ?

It doesn't seem to be your GA-EP45-DS3L.

And the black wiring depicted, is a mistake when
doing builder work. You want classically colored
twisted pairs for each 2-pin thing needing
connections. It makes it easier to get the polarity
right on the first try (for LEDs).

No harm will come from hooking up a two pin pair the
wrong way around. I prefer the color code, because
it tells me "what they had in mind" when they wired it.

Antec in particular, has made mistakes on front panel
wiring more than once. The part I consider weird
about this, is when they do make a mistake, it's *never*
with the VCC pin, never a risk of smoke or fire.
How do they make these mistakes, without ever
involving a "hot" pin ? I could never figure that
part out. If you bring me an Antec case today,
I'll get out my ohmmeter and buzz out the wiring
harness, before using it.

Paul


It is not a picture of my GA-EP45-DS3L. It is other unnamed MOBO. It is a
picture my MX330-X front panel connections. It shows speaker(beep)
connections to pins 18, 14 on unknown MOBO. It would make a beep. But it
still does not solve my problem. I am preparing a customer care support
email to Cougar.


The usual miserable documentation. It says on the page
that they're Compucase, and this is a subbrand of theirs.

https://cougargaming.com/products/cases2/mx330/

https://cougargaming.com/fileadmin/d...usermanual.pdf

Doesn't have wiring harness info in there that I can see.

It's quite common, to not document the wiring actually.

*******

https://cougargaming.com/global/img/...s/mx330/06.png

2x5 - dual USB2 cable, hopefully shielded, industry standard pinout?
2x10 - dual USB3 cable, industry standard pinout?
2x5 - HDAudio for headphone and microphone jacks

HDD_LED, PWR_LED, PWR_SW, RST_SW, SPKRpair (five 1x2 or similar)
(may have labels on box-pins)

It's not clear from the photos, whether there is a SPKR.

I looked at the pictures of the case and cannot see any sign of it.

*******

USB2 cable - usually not a problem, follows industry standard with one keying
pin missing to help with keying it correctly. 9 working pins.
USB3 cable - usually not a problem, follows industry standard.
One keying pin missing, 19 working pins for two 9 pin interfaces
HDAudio - Can be a dogs breakfast of seemingly random wiring
and what might look like a jumper wire of some sort.
- computer cases with jack-sensing side contacts are
proper HDAudio setups. They use AC97 audio wiring
when they don't have the side contacts.

Front Panel - the pins are likely labeled
- if SPKR is a 1x4 and has lift-able tabs, you can
move the pins in the shell if the motherboard uses
a 1x2 header pair for SPKR.

HTH,
Paul
  #23  
Old December 15th 19, 11:14 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Norm Why[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 114
Default Problems rebuilding system

You can get a "no beep" condition, by using a
reset button crushed in the ON position. Usually
OEM computer cases are the ones with sufficiently
cheesy buttons on the front of the computer, to
make incidents like this possible. I have one
computer here, where the buttons are such,
I know that some day that's how those buttons
will fail. The buttons speak of cheapness.
Anything mechanical is always suspect. I've been using a couple of
identical Antec cases, not normally noted for being cheap, for
computers now residing in the basement "computer room". Not too long
after purchase (but outside any hope of warranty) the power switch
failed on one of them and drove me crazy for a while. Rather than give
up I swapped the connections between "power" and "reset" on the MB and
it has worked fine for years now. Only real problem is that I can
almost never remember which of the cases has the swapped switches. If
I had any sense I'd apply some masking tape over the dead switch to
remind me...
Thanks John. Maybe reassignment of connections is the answer.

Because of propagation delays, the group seems not to have seen my
latest post or

"How-to-connect-case-cables-system-panel."
https://assets.rockpapershotgun.com/...stem-panel.jpg
What is that a picture of ?

It doesn't seem to be your GA-EP45-DS3L.

And the black wiring depicted, is a mistake when
doing builder work. You want classically colored
twisted pairs for each 2-pin thing needing
connections. It makes it easier to get the polarity
right on the first try (for LEDs).

No harm will come from hooking up a two pin pair the
wrong way around. I prefer the color code, because
it tells me "what they had in mind" when they wired it.

Antec in particular, has made mistakes on front panel
wiring more than once. The part I consider weird
about this, is when they do make a mistake, it's *never*
with the VCC pin, never a risk of smoke or fire.
How do they make these mistakes, without ever
involving a "hot" pin ? I could never figure that
part out. If you bring me an Antec case today,
I'll get out my ohmmeter and buzz out the wiring
harness, before using it.

Paul


It is not a picture of my GA-EP45-DS3L. It is other unnamed MOBO. It is a
picture my MX330-X front panel connections. It shows speaker(beep)
connections to pins 18, 14 on unknown MOBO. It would make a beep. But it
still does not solve my problem. I am preparing a customer care support
email to Cougar.


The usual miserable documentation. It says on the page
that they're Compucase, and this is a subbrand of theirs.

https://cougargaming.com/products/cases2/mx330/


https://cougargaming.com/fileadmin/d...usermanual.pdf

Doesn't have wiring harness info in there that I can see.

It's quite common, to not document the wiring actually.

*******

https://cougargaming.com/global/img/...s/mx330/06.png

2x5 - dual USB2 cable, hopefully shielded, industry standard pinout?
2x10 - dual USB3 cable, industry standard pinout?
2x5 - HDAudio for headphone and microphone jacks

HDD_LED, PWR_LED, PWR_SW, RST_SW, SPKRpair (five 1x2 or similar)
(may have labels on box-pins)

It's not clear from the photos, whether there is a SPKR.

I looked at the pictures of the case and cannot see any sign of it.

*******

USB2 cable - usually not a problem, follows industry standard with one
keying
pin missing to help with keying it correctly. 9 working pins.
USB3 cable - usually not a problem, follows industry standard.
One keying pin missing, 19 working pins for two 9 pin
interfaces
HDAudio - Can be a dogs breakfast of seemingly random wiring
and what might look like a jumper wire of some sort.
- computer cases with jack-sensing side contacts are
proper HDAudio setups. They use AC97 audio wiring
when they don't have the side contacts.

Front Panel - the pins are likely labeled
- if SPKR is a 1x4 and has lift-able tabs, you can
move the pins in the shell if the motherboard uses
a 1x2 header pair for SPKR.

HTH,
Paul


Thanks Paul. I removed one stick of Samsung 4GB DDR2 RAM and there is
progress. The BIOS never stops, it keeps trying repeatedly. I'm still trying
the get a better handle of front panel wiring. Beep codes would give more
debug info. Now the spinning of the CPU fan is concurrent with GTX 970 fan.
But still no output on HDMI. I may be able to get an early 2000's ATI Radeon
VGA card locally for $5. The BIOS screen might be seen without solving beep
diagnostics. Maybe not. So I'll need to get BIOS to recognize GTX 970. It
worked on my old build.



  #24  
Old December 15th 19, 08:03 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Norm Why[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 114
Default Problems rebuilding system

[snippage]
Thanks Paul. I removed one stick of Samsung 4GB DDR2 RAM and there is
progress. The BIOS never stops, it keeps trying repeatedly. I'm still
trying the get a better handle of front panel wiring. Beep codes would
give more debug info. Now the spinning of the CPU fan is concurrent with
GTX 970 fan. But still no output on HDMI. I may be able to get an early
2000's ATI Radeon VGA card locally for $5. The BIOS screen might be seen
without solving beep diagnostics. Maybe not. So I'll need to get BIOS to
recognize GTX 970. It worked on my old build.


It is said that when confused sleep. This confusion makes me very sleepy.
After sleep I arrived at some working hypothesis:

1. The front panel connectors are meant to be dynamic not static, so I moved
split POWER LEDs to SPEAKER+ and Minus.

2. If one RAM stick is good zero is better.

Observations: Still no beeps. Fancy color RAM LEDs still glowing. Continuing
CPU reboot cycle. Still no HDMI BIOS page from PCIe GTX970.

Working conclusions:

1. Zero or one RAM sticks makes no difference. Might as well use one.

2. Don't know function of RAM LEDs.

3. I still don't know operation of SPEAKER+ and SPEAKER-. No beeps. Does it
matter? Every time I use recommended polarity, I fail.

4. A PCI VGA adapter would be nice.

5. PCIe GTX970 will never be recognized until I boot Wn10 OS.

6. I will reinstall one RAM stick and wait for further sleep.



  #25  
Old December 15th 19, 10:01 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Paul[_28_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,467
Default Problems rebuilding system

Norm Why wrote:
[snippage]
Thanks Paul. I removed one stick of Samsung 4GB DDR2 RAM and there is
progress. The BIOS never stops, it keeps trying repeatedly. I'm still
trying the get a better handle of front panel wiring. Beep codes would
give more debug info. Now the spinning of the CPU fan is concurrent with
GTX 970 fan. But still no output on HDMI. I may be able to get an early
2000's ATI Radeon VGA card locally for $5. The BIOS screen might be seen
without solving beep diagnostics. Maybe not. So I'll need to get BIOS to
recognize GTX 970. It worked on my old build.


It is said that when confused sleep. This confusion makes me very sleepy.
After sleep I arrived at some working hypothesis:

1. The front panel connectors are meant to be dynamic not static, so I moved
split POWER LEDs to SPEAKER+ and Minus.

2. If one RAM stick is good zero is better.

Observations: Still no beeps. Fancy color RAM LEDs still glowing. Continuing
CPU reboot cycle. Still no HDMI BIOS page from PCIe GTX970.

Working conclusions:

1. Zero or one RAM sticks makes no difference. Might as well use one.

2. Don't know function of RAM LEDs.

3. I still don't know operation of SPEAKER+ and SPEAKER-. No beeps. Does it
matter? Every time I use recommended polarity, I fail.

4. A PCI VGA adapter would be nice.

5. PCIe GTX970 will never be recognized until I boot Wn10 OS.

6. I will reinstall one RAM stick and wait for further sleep.


The manual says the four LEDs near the DIMMs are "phase LEDs"
and "The number of lighted LEDs indicates the CPU loading".
Your guess is as good as mine as to how the hardware drives
those LEDs, whether they're an actual current measurement
done with LEDs, or on the other hand, the VCore phases may have
enable signals, and as the BIOS SMM changes the number of
phases enabled many times a second, the LEDs are a side effect
of how many phases are being used.

Since the function is tied to "Dynamic Energy Saver" and runs
from the OS, a wild guess would be that all phases stay turned
on during BIOS POST (as nothing has attempted to request a
different phase setting just yet). This means, at a guess,
the LEDs aren't helping us right now. Unless they
flicker or indicate some sort of issue with VCore itself.

Since the CPU tends to rail on one core in the BIOS, you
would expect the CPU to be in a relatively high power
state during the POST sequence. I can watch this on
my current computer, the Test Machine, by using the
Kill-O-Watt power meter and monitoring power usage.
My machine draws 180W with CPU fully railed (Prime95),
120W on one core, 96W on idle, and POST shows 120W values
typically.

*******

I need more info on what you mean by "Continuing CPU reboot cycle".
This implies that perhaps there is still a power issue
in the picture, which could be related to the ATX power supply,
or it could be an issue with the VCore circuit. The 9650 is
in the CPU compatibility chart, so VCore should be beefy
enough to drive it.

To detect whether the board is coming out of RESET OK,
you can try monitoring the LEDs on the NIC interface. If
you have a router, run a cable from the router to the
NIC RJ45 and plug in. When the PHY comes out of RESET,
the LEDs will auto-negotiate (needs no CPU) and indicate GbE,
or 100BT or whatever. Not all motherboard products have LEDs
on the NIC connector area. Some will have two, like a yellow and
a green LED. On my GbE NIC, in GbE mode, the Yellow and
Green are both lit. If stuck in RESET, the LEDs are likely
to be OFF. If they stay OFF, and you know there is a good
eight wire Ethernet cable in place to your (running) router,
then the board could be staying in RESET and that's why it is
not POSTing and beeping like it should.

The ATX12V 2x2 should be plugged in. The cable has two yellow
wires (+12) and two black wires (GND). It can provide up to
144W of 12V to run VCore with. The connectors have a latch,
and with the latch engaged, the connector cannot "walk out"
due to thermal stress. It's the same latch that the
main 24 pin connector uses.

You can use 20 pin power on the 24 pin motherboard power input,
and pin 1 aligns with pin 1 in that case, leaving four motherboard
pins exposed and unused. The additional pins give slightly more
ampacity for three of the major rails. The most important contribution
there, is the yellow 12V wire in that section, as it provides
sufficient power to run a 6600 PCI Express video card (which needs
four amps). PCI Express video cards with no power connector
on the end, can draw up to 4.5A from the slot. High end cards
like your GTX970, draw only 2A from the slot, and lots
more current from the one or more power connectors on
the end of the card.

You know that video cards, high end ones, have PCIE connectors
on the end. The video card is unlikely to go to a high power
state during BIOS POST. If they didn't follow that rule,
my ATX supply would probably be flat by now :-) It's the
CPU that likes to spool up, while the video cards are
mostly well behaved during POST.

And since we're doing the "beep tests", one of the bonuses
of having no video card, is no video card electrical load.
So we know for sure the video card is not contributing to
the reboot loop or whatever it is you're seeing.

*******

If the ATX power supply fan is going "On and Off"
repetitively, then it could be an ATX power supply problem!
It can also be a problem with the PS_ON# signal sent
by the motherboard. There are a surprisingly large
number of PS_ON# signal failures, which has never
made sense to me. The pin only draws maybe 2mA,
yet even on boards with beefy drive (24mA? 48mA?),
the damn thing can fail to work properly. Part of it
has to do with the fact the motherboard input "PS_ON#"
is not a conventional logic signal.

While we might call that a "reboot loop", it's a
power issue of sorts. Modern supplies do not do this,
as they tend to latch off under fault conditions and
require the operator to "cycle" the rear power switch
to remove the fault state. Only a really cheesy supply
could go ON and OFF on its own, for fun. My first power
supply could do that, especially after the 12V became
so weak, it could only supply 0.2 amps before tipping
over.

Paul
  #26  
Old December 16th 19, 02:15 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Norm Why[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 114
Default Problems rebuilding system

Thanks Paul,

The manual says the four LEDs near the DIMMs are "phase LEDs"
and "The number of lighted LEDs indicates the CPU loading".
Your guess is as good as mine as to how the hardware drives
those LEDs, whether they're an actual current measurement
done with LEDs, or on the other hand, the VCore phases may have
enable signals, and as the BIOS SMM changes the number of
phases enabled many times a second, the LEDs are a side effect
of how many phases are being used.

Since the function is tied to "Dynamic Energy Saver" and runs
from the OS, a wild guess would be that all phases stay turned
on during BIOS POST (as nothing has attempted to request a
different phase setting just yet). This means, at a guess,
the LEDs aren't helping us right now. Unless they
flicker or indicate some sort of issue with VCore itself.

Since the CPU tends to rail on one core in the BIOS, you
would expect the CPU to be in a relatively high power
state during the POST sequence. I can watch this on
my current computer, the Test Machine, by using the
Kill-O-Watt power meter and monitoring power usage.
My machine draws 180W with CPU fully railed (Prime95),
120W on one core, 96W on idle, and POST shows 120W values
typically.

*******

I need more info on what you mean by "Continuing CPU reboot cycle"


PC knows what it is doing, it recycles in short time. Power comes on, fans
turn, RAM phase lights glow. The PC shuts down. A moment later, PC comes
back to life and cycles ad finitum.

This is an improvement over two RAM DIMMs inserted when cycles ends after ~3
tries. These tries take long because CPU is confused.

This implies that perhaps there is still a power issue
in the picture, which could be related to the ATX power supply,
or it could be an issue with the VCore circuit. The 9650 is
in the CPU compatibility chart, so VCore should be beefy
enough to drive it.

To detect whether the board is coming out of RESET OK,
you can try monitoring the LEDs on the NIC interface. If
you have a router, run a cable from the router to the
NIC RJ45 and plug in. When the PHY comes out of RESET,
the LEDs will auto-negotiate (needs no CPU) and indicate GbE,
or 100BT or whatever. Not all motherboard products have LEDs
on the NIC connector area. Some will have two, like a yellow and
a green LED. On my GbE NIC, in GbE mode, the Yellow and
Green are both lit. If stuck in RESET, the LEDs are likely
to be OFF. If they stay OFF, and you know there is a good
eight wire Ethernet cable in place to your (running) router,
then the board could be staying in RESET and that's why it is
not POSTing and beeping like it should.

The ATX12V 2x2 should be plugged in. The cable has two yellow
wires (+12) and two black wires (GND). It can provide up to
144W of 12V to run VCore with. The connectors have a latch,
and with the latch engaged, the connector cannot "walk out"
due to thermal stress. It's the same latch that the
main 24 pin connector uses.

Yep, it is

You can use 20 pin power on the 24 pin motherboard power input,
and pin 1 aligns with pin 1 in that case, leaving four motherboard
pins exposed and unused. The additional pins give slightly more
ampacity for three of the major rails. The most important contribution
there, is the yellow 12V wire in that section, as it provides
sufficient power to run a 6600 PCI Express video card (which needs
four amps). PCI Express video cards with no power connector
on the end, can draw up to 4.5A from the slot. High end cards
like your GTX970, draw only 2A from the slot, and lots
more current from the one or more power connectors on
the end of the card.

You know that video cards, high end ones, have PCIE connectors
on the end. The video card is unlikely to go to a high power
state during BIOS POST. If they didn't follow that rule,
my ATX supply would probably be flat by now :-) It's the
CPU that likes to spool up, while the video cards are
mostly well behaved during POST.

And since we're doing the "beep tests", one of the bonuses
of having no video card, is no video card electrical load.
So we know for sure the video card is not contributing to
the reboot loop or whatever it is you're seeing.

*******

If the ATX power supply fan is going "On and Off"
repetitively, then it could be an ATX power supply problem!
It can also be a problem with the PS_ON# signal sent
by the motherboard. There are a surprisingly large
number of PS_ON# signal failures, which has never
made sense to me. The pin only draws maybe 2mA,
yet even on boards with beefy drive (24mA? 48mA?),
the damn thing can fail to work properly. Part of it
has to do with the fact the motherboard input "PS_ON#"
is not a conventional logic signal.

While we might call that a "reboot loop", it's a
power issue of sorts. Modern supplies do not do this,
as they tend to latch off under fault conditions and
require the operator to "cycle" the rear power switch
to remove the fault state. Only a really cheesy supply
could go ON and OFF on its own, for fun. My first power
supply could do that, especially after the 12V became
so weak, it could only supply 0.2 amps before tipping
over.

Paul


On page 48 of manual it says PCI graphics is the default. Without PCI
graphics one will never see the BIOS screen to change the default.

Wrote to Cougar.


  #27  
Old December 16th 19, 04:02 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Norm Why[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 114
Default Problems rebuilding system

From manual, here are the beep codes:

Q: What do the beeps emitted during the POST mean?
A: The following Award BIOS beep code descriptions may help you identify
possible computer problems.
(For reference only.)
1 short: System boots successfully
2 short: CMOS setting error
1 long, 1 short: Memory or motherboard error
1 long, 2 short: Monitor or graphics card error
1 long, 3 short: Keyboard error
1 long, 9 short: BIOS ROM error
Continuous long beeps: Graphics card not inserted properly
Continuous short beeps: Power error


I switched the split connectors and still no beeps. The PC continues to
reboot ad nauseum with one RAM DIMM.
The split connectors are probably as labeled POWER LED+/-

How useful are these beep codes compared to bare metal diagnosis? Not much.
Given observations the beep codes can be predicted. The biggest issue is
RAM. Now it is less an issue.

On page 48 of manual it says PCI graphics is the default. Without PCI
graphics one will never see the BIOS screen to change the default.

I'll get a $5 PCI VGA adapter Monday and try again.

I cannot find any reference to beep/beeper with Cougar. Maybe it is
considered obsolete, and not installed



  #28  
Old December 16th 19, 05:32 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Paul[_28_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,467
Default Problems rebuilding system

Norm Why wrote:

I need more info on what you mean by "Continuing CPU reboot cycle"


PC knows what it is doing, it recycles in short time. Power comes on, fans
turn, RAM phase lights glow. The PC shuts down. A moment later, PC comes
back to life and cycles ad finitum.

This is an improvement over two RAM DIMMs inserted when cycles ends after ~3
tries. These tries take long because CPU is confused.


Normally, when a PC shuts down like that, it's caused by THERMTRIP.

That's a signal from the CPU, that it's past 100C or so. It's
supposed to cause the PC to go off and stay off. Clearance of
such a fault requires removal of +5VSB (switch off at the back
of the PC).

You could also cause a shutoff, by overloading +5VSB. The +5VSB
runs the USB ports and it's only rated at 2.5A or 3A or so. But
I would expect that fault to latch off too. Only if the BIOS
was set to a particular "recovery policy when power comes back"
in the BIOS, might such a flaw result in a loop.

I don't have a good explanation that precisely fits the
symptoms. There are things that can cause it, but generally
the loop should be broken.

Discovery that the processor is not one the BIOS supports,
might do that, but I don't recollect any recent results
to refer to. My P2B-S for example (year 2000), didn't know what a
Tualatin was, but I fixed that by loading a different
BIOS and doing a microcode patch. The "ID string" on the
BIOS screen was still wrong (called it a Pentium II or
something), but at least the CPU was "accepted" and boot
would finish.


On page 48 of manual it says PCI graphics is the default. Without PCI
graphics one will never see the BIOS screen to change the default.

Wrote to Cougar.


That setting allows you to select which bus to examine first
for a video card. That motherboard has only PCI bus and PCI Express
bus, and has no AGP bus. And since it's a P45, at a guess
there are no graphics. P45, the P likely stands for Performance,
and a gamer would use their own video card. Other letters
they might use, would include G45 or Q45, and SKUs like
that would have a GPU in the Northbridge. Q45 is a designation
used for boards including the Intel Management Engine (ME)
for remote control of the PC via NIC packets. (The refurb Optiplex
I've got, has a Q45.)

Even without using the setting, if there is no PCI Express card,
it should still examine the PCI bus when it gets around to it.

At the current time, with the looping behavior you've got, I
don't think it is getting near enough to the conditional beep
codes, to issue any beep codes. Something is wrong in the
(register-only based) BIOS code. And whether a hardware signal
is taking it out of action, or the BIOS code itself is having
a wobble for itself and resetting, we're just not getting to
the beep code section.

Even if you had a PCI Port 80 card, the Port 80 display might not
update with new digit values before the looping hits it. Being
able to monitor the voltages, might give a hint if the problem
is power related, but you need the right electronics trash
to catch stuff like that.

*******

You can see there is something that isn't quite right
about these boards. But, what is it ? For one guy, it was
the switch to a PCI graphics card that allowed him to see
the screen and get on with it. Any old PCI graphics card
would do for this - there is no need for anything fancy.
like a 6200 PCI or a FX5200 PCI would be candidates.
The 6200 and the FX5200 PCI were available for quite
a while before they stopped making them. (The 6200 was
notable, in that it had native support for more
than one bus standard, which made it cheaper to make
for the manufacturers. It didn't have to be as expensive
as a bridged board.)

https://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyt...ot-loop-2.html

Does yours loop with both RAM and video removed ?

Don't forget to remove all power, before adding
or removing those...

Paul
  #29  
Old December 16th 19, 06:04 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Paul[_28_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,467
Default Problems rebuilding system

Norm Why wrote:


I switched the split connectors and still no beeps. The PC continues to
reboot ad nauseum with one RAM DIMM.
The split connectors are probably as labeled POWER LED+/-

How useful are these beep codes compared to bare metal diagnosis? Not much.
Given observations the beep codes can be predicted. The biggest issue is
RAM. Now it is less an issue.

On page 48 of manual it says PCI graphics is the default. Without PCI
graphics one will never see the BIOS screen to change the default.

I'll get a $5 PCI VGA adapter Monday and try again.

I cannot find any reference to beep/beeper with Cougar. Maybe it is
considered obsolete, and not installed


There are some Antecs that are "too fancy to have speakers".
And they are missing the SPKR used for beeping.

You have to talk to a local computer shop, to see if they
stock either a piezo (one inch black disc with two wires),
or have a SPKR (2.5" speaker perhaps) available. Some small
shops carry things such as temporary reset and power buttons,
and also carry something you can use as a SPKR when your case
is missing one.

The reviews for this one are not good, so this link is
purely for the picture of the item.

https://www.amazon.ca/Baoblaze-Mothe.../dp/B0798PXK3L

This is the more conventional kind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_spe...cropped%29.JPG

So far, all my cases here have the SPKR kind with the magnet.

My Optiplex refurb is neat, in that it has a tiny speaker
which also plays regular LineOut audio. But the sound
is tinny. It helps for situations where you forgot
to plug in computer speakers to LineOut, and then the
tiny speaker assembly just above the hard drives,
makes noise. Rather than being a nice 2W analog power
amp driving the speaker, the speaker is more likely
to be a 32 ohm unamplified speaker, and the sound level
is equivalent to "headphones" in magnitude. You can
barely hear it, and it's basically a reminder to
plug in the real audio output speakers.

Paul
 




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