BIOS Updates forum

Hi there. I've been manically researching my problem, and i haven't seen anything that matches my situation.

The system in question is:
AMD 3000+ XP
Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 motherboard
1 gig OCZ 2700 DDR RAM
Seagate SATA 250 gig drive
Seagate ATA 133 200 gig drive
NEC DVD-RW

The motherboard was purchased over a year ago, used briefly, then reboxed.
About a week ago, i built the above machine around it, with absolutely no problems.

A day or two ago, it began hanging on boot, just before the memory test.
My boss (this is a company machine) told me that it hung like that for about ten minutes, then booted.

I tested it, and it did the same thing, so i disconnected most everything from the board, and it booted fine.

Attempting to find the problem device, i reconnected the devices, one by one, and lo, it hung when a particular USB device was plugged in (either a USB hard drive, or a Compact Flash card reader, i don't remember, at this point).

I removed the devices, and rebooted...

and nothing happened.

The drives spin up, the DVD drive is checked, and then it just sits there.
The drive activity light lights up if you open the DVD drive, but other than that, nothing. Additionally, the board no longer beeps as such, but makes a single little crunchy noise through the speaker.

I've cleared the CMOS (by jumper and battery), stripped the board down, used a PCI video card, removed the RAM to check for beep codes (nothing), attempted to do a boot block recovery (it's an Award Bios), but it completely ignores the existence of the floppy, and i've had no luck attempting to get it to do so. The chips themselves are soldered on, so there's no swapping them out.

The board has a back-up BIOS ROM, but that didn't seem to help much, and it never launched into the auto-recovery as it should have, if there were a problem with the main BIOS chip.

I haven't been able to find a way to force the BIOS to access the floppy, or do much of anything else.

I read the thread about shorting the pins on the BIOS chip itself, but i have no idea where to look for the datasheets, and mighty google has not aided me. The crunchy beep makes me think that it's totally and royally screwed.

I'm at a loss here, and my boss, even though this is not in any way my fault, is going to broil me over it. Any help at all would be vastly appreciated.

Athlon XP cores are so small that it is easy to install cooler so that it leans to either side. Then you have progressively worse boots and eventually no boot.

There's no problem with the CPU... the board has since been replaced, and the same processor is currently running like a champ on the new board.

If possible, I'd still like to get the gigabyte running, so if anybody has any ideas, i'm open to them.

Sharedoc wrote:Athlon XP cores are so small that it is easy to install cooler so that it leans to either side. Then you have progressively worse boots and eventually no boot.

Thanx Sharedoc. Specially reigistered to this form to say this.
I've had simular problems as the person you kindly answered.
In my case, the boot and usb 2.0 problems became very unpredicteble.
Reinstalled win98se with my athlon1200 socket suited on a award modular bios v6.00 pg with 128 mb, but without the pheriperials.
Didn't help.
Placing my pc horizontally seemed to work.
So i was afraid i had to re-asemble the **** thing, due to a hick-up in the motherboard.
Searching the internet brought me to the short but very meaningfull answer you gave.
Putting 1 and 1 together i wobbled the fan placed on my athlon.
And yes, the boot failed immediately at bios startup (never had that before).
So, I took the processor out of its socket and replaced it, and with some feeling placed the fan on top of it. Everything works fine now.
My big question now is... is there a more permanent solution for this prob?
Thanks in advance and by allmeans thanks for your previous solution/
It really helped me a lot!

Thank you for your kind words.

I think the only solution is precision installation of the cooler with some thermal paste, then removal of the cooler and inspection of the paste residual on the cooler. You can see from the residual if the cooler is evenly leaning towards the core. If not, then try different positioning of the cooler until it gives a evenly residual pattern.