BleepingComputer.com: Monitor will not fire up from tower

Forgive me if this is a redundant topic but I surfed thru many pages to try and find a similar topic.

Got a tower here that I am troubleshooting for my sister.

tower would turn on, get to the tower flash screen, then shut back off. So I treplaced the power supply and unplugged the monitor cable from the onboard plug and I tried 2 different video cards, a PCI and an AGP style.

all fans and such come on, no strange noises, and no confirmation beeps when it boots. I even yanked the HDD to gain access to it to save some data, but this tower still wont fire up the monitor. I have the orange light right now, and it never goes green.

Any clues?

Motherboard shot?

Looks to be a Biostar MB in a CISNET tower..whatever that is!

I can pick up a new MB if that's the problem, but wanted to bounce it off someone in here first.

Thank You.

Have you tried to "reset" the bios with the jumper on the motherboard?

It is possible that a BIOS setting is keeping the video from being enumerated at bootup.

Hope this helps,

Before you replace the motherboard, you may want to find out if the problem is or is not the monitor.
Do you have access to another monitor you can try? Or hook the monitor up to another system.

This post has been edited by Queen-Evie: 28 June 2009 - 07:10 PM

You might also want to look closely at the motherboard for something that looks like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...apacitor_01.jpg

This is a photo of "popped" or exploded capacitors on the motherboard. Many manufacturers have been victim to this and there are 2 possible fixes. One is replace the motherboard and the other would be to have someont with soldering experience remove and replace the failed capacitors. If that's the problem in the first place.

Hope this helps,

whoops, I guess I also forgot to mention that I did NOT try another monitor, but I stuck the HDD in another tower and I know the monitor works likes a champ. (Its a Sony)

however, I COULD try another monitor if need to, but I am actually using this Sony monitor right now to run updates on yet another tower I'm getting rid of.


For some goofy reason, should I try another monitor on this faulty tower?

This post has been edited by charlestongrandma: 28 June 2009 - 07:20 PM

It wouldn't hurt anything to try another monitor on the faulty tower. If it doesn't work, you can rule out a failed monitor.
Just for kicks, you could also try the monitor on another system. Cover all the bases.

I have tried that monitor on other towers and it works fine.

I was even using that monitor to do updates on another tower while I was typing this thread. So I am dead certain that the monitor is fine.

Any other ideas?

Btw, I havent had a chance to really look closely at the MB and see what condition the capacitors are in.

This post has been edited by charlestongrandma: 29 June 2009 - 05:25 AM

Firstly, you say that the PC does not beep? Did it beep before when working correctly? Ie on bios post your normally get a beep after a successful post (not always but most motherboards/PCs do).

Also are you confident enough to move components around in your pc??

If so open it up, and making sure you are extra careful not to knock anything on the board i.e. capacitors n stuff.

Make sure you have no power enabled to the pc (sometimes the motherboard will have an led indicating power, wait for this to dissipate before touching anything, it can take upto 10 seconds in some cases!) Also you need to ground yourself to something in the house that is already grounded using an antistatic wriststrap (ie. a radiator) (the grounding is not always necessary but dont blame me if you static fry your hardware from lack of antistatic protection!)

Re-seat your memory, ide/sata cables (both at the motherboard end and the drive ends), all pci/agp/pci-e cards, all power cables, and possibly if you are confident enough to, the cpu itself. When I mean reseat, I mean actually totally remove/unplug each component then replace them in their original ports.

Alot of the time I have found unseated memory/pci/pci-e/agp cards due to heat expansion causes this problem. Also make sure your graphics card has power to it (if the facility for this exists) and especially check that all the motherboard power connections are seated correctly, I have noticed some power supplies use the E-ATX 24 pin but the last 4 pins dont seem to go in as cleanly (due to them being detachable!) so you need to ensure they are in tight, also check the cpu 12v 4 pin power is seated ok too!

Let me know if this works or not and I will try help you some more if I can if the above fails.

High500

Thanx for the reply.

After posting my most recent reply, I went thru and did all of the things you said. I physically took every component out of the tower (with it unplugged) and reinstalled (rebuilt so to speak) the tower. ribbon cables and all.

Nothing.

there really wasnt anything extra in the tower except:
HDD, DVD rom, Floppy, ethernet card, 1 stick of memory. No extra goodies. Everything else was onboard (video and sound, mouse and keys).

Gotta be the MB. Plus it's a Biostar, so that should explain it, even though it was built in 2005.

do you get power at all? do the power lights and harddrive lights light up?

If you do, try removing all pci cards and even the dvd and hd drives just so you have a clean boot see what happens?

If you dont, you may be right about the motherboard, have you tried a different powersupply though?

High500