Computer Not booting properly

[Neural Interface]

A mate of mine was away for about a week and when he came back his comp wouldnt work, as far as he knows there has been no one near it but anyway.

I've built a few comps over the years including his and Im stumped as to what the hell is going on, basically it wont boot, not even to the BIOS.

 

I switched the cmos jumper to reset it and also tried booting in safemode.

Problem is If I reset the cmos it will get to the BIOS and as soon as I save the BIOS settings and restart it wont boot again, so I then have to reset the CMOS jumper again thus deleting any BIOS changes I made, This makes installing windows an issue, I managed to get it to boot once and tried installing XP but the install got an error at the end (obviously, sigh) and when rebooted I was back to square 1.

 

What is likely to be at issue here?, dodgey power supply (he has a decent coolermaster one around 6 months old, 600w iirc), broke mobo?

 

DFI lanparty NF4, Opteron 146, 4Gb ram etc all typical stuff really.

 

Im not sure how clear the situation is, I have thought about swapping his PSU with one of mine, or maybe even the BIOS battery, but I would like other opinons before I start dismantling my own rigs.

Fell free to ask any questions and I'll clarify if need be!

 

Cheers, Neural.

[paulktreg]

Try this first, how to do a "proper" CMOS clear on DFI NF4 motherboards.

 

Cheers

 

Paul

Edited August 4, 2009 by paulktreg

[Fight Game]

battery may be dead

[paulktreg]

battery may be dead

 

It may very be but you can usually get a motherboard to boot on default settings. The battery enables the time, date and any non-default bios settings to be saved in most cases. I suppose in some cases, ram voltage for instance, this could differ so for the cost of a battery it's worth a try!

 

Cheers

 

Paul

Edited August 4, 2009 by paulktreg