My computer thinks it's a toaster
 

The computer I use for my business has decided it's not a computer anymore, it's just a big beeping paperweight. Not being real versed in motherboard diagnosis, I'm bringing it to you geniuses.

This afternoon I went to plug my USB palm pilot cable into the back of the computer. It's dark back there (and dusty, and cluttered with cables), so I sort of turned the case about 45-degrees so I could see what I was doing. Then, that plugged in, I turned on the monitor (which I usually leave off) and got the monitor's "no signal" message.

I crawled back under the computer and discovered that the monitor cable was now connected to an unseated AGP video card, loose inside the computer. Whups. Guess I over-wrenched it trying to see my way to my USB port.

I powered off the machine at the power switch, cracked the case and reseated the AGP card. Put everything back together, pressed the power button and... it goes "ba-beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep". If you're counting, that's eight beeps. The monitor's still giving me the "no signal" message--but the computer exibits this same beeping behavior even if I pull the AGP card entirely.

This mobo doesn't have onboard video, so I can't just switch video ports and see what's going on. And bear in mind--this computer was working great (with months of uptime--yes, running Windows XP!) until I rotated it in place to get to its backside.

Thoughts?

Have you check that all other components haven't moved inside or just the AGP card?

I'd say to pull and re-seat the video card again.

Sometimes they're finicky and won't work unless they're 110% seated.

If those are long beeps, then it might be memory.

Nah, they're pretty short beeps.

I just pulled and reseated all the sound, network, and video cards, plus the ram. No change.

I do notice that there are a series of four red and green LEDs sitting inside one of the onboard ports. Might that be trying to tell me something?

You think I might have damaged the mobo by wrenching the AGP card out of its home?

8 (short) beeps at this site says "Display memory Read/Write test failure" so maybe the video card is damaged? Do you have another video card you could try?

Good find, Rick. That narrows it down to the display. Now the question is whether it's the card or the slot...

I have a video card in a linux fileserver that I run headless. I don't have time to mess with that now, but tomorrow morning I'll drop the fileserver and swap the card over and see what happens.

Tomorrow?!?!
I've been watching this unfold, with eager anticipation, all afternoon...just to be told..."To Be Continued"?
That's...just...wrong...

I can pretty much guarantee that you toasted the vid card when it came unseated, unless putting it back in got dust down into the slot and you're not getting proper contact :(

Hey at least this isn't a TV show where you'd have to wait until next season...:)

I don't think beep codes are alway universal. Find out what motherboard you have, and then Google diag stuff for it, or head to the manufacturers' web site. You could have damaged either the AGP port, or the video card. If you have a PCI video card, try that. Or, another AGP card. I would say that you cracked a copper trace in there somewhere, and whatever that was, is now toasty fried.

Beep codes are not universal, especially the long ones. as for your situation, hopefully its just not seated right, but if you give a computer power when a card is not seated properly, it can fry the card, or even the motherboard.

Is it merely a coincidence that "Toaster" has remained silent?

I thought it was kind of funny that it may have FRIED a video card in a pci SLOT

Hopefully it was only set on "warm".

And... BOR: I'm glad my electronics disasters are providing you appropriate entertainment. :crazy:

While you're toasting, remember. Everything's better with cheese.

No, I was just pretending I have enough class to not mention myself when someone mentions toasters. Either that or I've been away from TFP for a couple of days. :P

Well, you said up top, "but the computer exibits this same beeping behavior even if I pull the AGP card entirely". Very few motherboards will give you a POST-beep diagnostic just for not having a video card (a video card is not required in a system for a variety of reasons... going to be headless... running console on serial, et cetera). If it's the SAME error with or without the card, there could well be something else amiss. Just a warning...

I’ve never run into a consumer grade mother board with out onboard video that was ever happy about not having a video card in it.

Have you looked closely at the card, the slot, and so forth, to see if you can see any cracks, burned or melted areas, dirt that might be preventing contact, bent pins, etc? Might be easier to do that first and see if something is obvious before you start swapping with your fileserver card.

You said you powered down the computer, then reseated the vid card. All modern motherboards still have like some power going on, unless you actually remove the power cord or use the PS power switch to turn it off. So, with power to the motherboard, you accidently removed the vid card. Then, again, with power still supplied to the motherboard, you reseated the vid card. Hmmmm... Probably not good. I think it's 3.3V all the time unless you use the kill switch on the PS or remove the power cord.

Well, I went ahead and ripped the AGP video card (a Voodo 2! wow!) out of my file server and put it in my business machine, and the thing booted. Now, a couple problems:

The fileserver (which used to have 319 days of uptime on it! Boo!) won't boot normally. Hopefully I'm simply "a vid card short" at this point, and a quick trip to Circuit City will square that away.

The business machine boots okay, but it doesn't recognize its NIC anymore. Or, it recognizes it by name, and claims to have a driver installed, but won't acknowledge a connection on it, and the device manager has a yellow ! over the icon.

Also, it wants to install a newly-discovered "multimedia audio device", which it can't find a driver for. Audio works fine, even so.

Why would it suddenly go forgetful about its two PCI cards?

EDIT: It's not that it's gone forgetful. It's got an IRQ collision or something. The error message on the Hardware Manager error for the NIC is "Cannot get enough resources to function". Maybe I won't work too hard on solving that until I've got my replacement video card.

IRQ conflicts will be caused by the new card taking up different allocations than your computer is used to, it very seldom happens nowadays, but happens nevertheless.

If you go into device manager and to the item that is yellow-flagged, right click and go to properties, then go along to resources, you should be able to manually set the irq (i think this only happens when it detects a conflict). Change it to something that hopefully won't conflict with anything else.


From your original post, the first thing i was worried about was damage to the AGP slot on your mobo, i'd be checking that out very, very closely. But it seems as if it's worked without any troubles. So from there, it sounds like you mashed your gfx card :<

Look for any physical damage on the card itself, since your mobo seems undamaged, it's likely that the damage is around the connector for you screen. I'd be tempted to test it on another computer if possible - might still be partially useful (for your server etc).

All-in-all, i'd say you got away with murder there, that could have been catastrophically bad.

The only reason it forgot the 2 PCI devices is that you removed those cards and reseated them. Pull those two cards out, boot the machine all the way up, then shut down, add a card, install the driver, shut down again, add the other card, install it's driver, and the machine should work out it's IRQ issues all on it's own.

If anyone else comes to this thread to troubleshoot their video card doing this, another good thing to check on newer video cards is to make sure the cable from your power supply to the video card is still plugged in. Most modern 3-D cards need more power than the slot can provide, so they have to have a seperate power lead plugged into them before they will function.