Is my BIOS dead?

Question

For the last couple of weeks my parents computer has been really shaky. It was having problems with suddenly shutting off for no reason when In a game. And a lot of graphics driver errors. So I thought I should clean out the AGP port. (I followed all the rules, power off, ground your self, etc..) Just blew it with a can of air. But when I went back to turn the computer on, it wouldn't boot! It wont even let me boot from a CD!. I went into the BIOS and went through the menus and when I got to the "Boot" menu it crashed. It just locked up. So I tried to clear the CMOS. But it seems like it did next to nothing. When I filled out the BIOS info again (skipping the boot menu) and it restarted, all that showed up is the POST and than it froze right after it was done detecting the Harddrive and CD drive.

Is there anything I can do? Or is my motherboard dead?

Ha ha! Success. I reseated all the power and IDE cables and it works! Thanks a bunch guys I was afraid I would need to get a new Mobo.

Thanks again =)
Jim

Answer 1

Well it may be as simple as the memory or other item is just not plugged in well. Open it back up and check to see that all of the "pluggable" items are well seated. You may want to see what happens when you unplug the HD and CD drive cables. It could be you simply disconnected one of the power plugs to one of them which will cause a lockup when the bios attempts to check them. So try it without them and see if you are working up to that point. Then reconnect them ONE at a time and see what happens.

By the way, blowing canned air inside a computer is not inherently safe. Some air cans produce as much as 40K volts of static electricity when sprayed. That can kill memory, processors, etc, etc.

Answer 2

Simple..

It's a hardware issue, take anything in the pci slots, e.g a modem, or some crappy controller or sound card.

Reset bios to default, and go back and set time, and start it up into the OS.