Can't get into my bios
Troublemann
Status: New User - Welcome
Joined: 03 Apr 2005
Posts: 1
Location: Houston
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Hello to whom it may concern,

I recently bought a case and transferred all my hardware from the old to the new one and I'm sure I have every connected to same way it was when I had it in the old computer but when I boot it up the only thing I get is power. My monitor isn't detected nor am I able to get into the bios. Can anyone tell me what could have happened? Like I stated I can get power but nothing else. Could I have caused damage to my motherboard and is what I'm experiencing related to a motherboard error? Look forward to someone feeding me some pertinent info. Thanks in advance...
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jeffd
Status: Assistant
Joined: 04 Oct 2003
Posts: 594
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Hi Troubleman, welcome to the forums. It's hard to say with power not working. Since you are using components that were known good before transferring them, it simplifies the process a little bit.

There are two main possibilities:
1 - the worst one, you shorted out the board accidentally with static electricity. The lack of any beeps, and the inability to get into bios point in that direction. Usually if you follow reasonably careful antistatic procedures there isn't that much risk, but all it takes is one jolt of static electricity to fry the board, memory, whatever.

I've had friends who've done this, easy to do, but easy to avoid.

2 - , and more pleasant to consider: it's a bad connection somewhere. Are the hard drives spinning up when you say the computer is 'on'. What parts are on? If you can't get into the bios that's not a good sign, to be honest, but it can just be a bad connection, I've seen that many times, it's the most common problem.

You can open the box, unplugged of course from the wall power, then carefullly redo each connection, when in doubt I use electric contact cleaner too [make sure to let it dry THOUROUGHLY before putting power to the board].

Sometimes that's all it takes. And of course, make sure the power supply actually works, it's not a cheapo unit, you can tell that by unscrewing the powersupply, and holding it in your hand, if it feels like it doesn't weigh much more than the metal enclosure, it may be cheap and simply have failed, which is much better than the mobo failing.

That's all that comes to mind at first thought, let me know how it turns out.
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vkaryl
Status: Contributor
Joined: 31 Oct 2004
Posts: 273
Location: back of beyond - s. UT, closer to Vegas than SLC
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One other thing to check: even though you just "moved" the mainboard, make sure that your ram sticks are seated properly! If your ram isn't detected first, all you WILL get sometimes is a power on state, nothing else will go forward....

Try booting from a cd to see if you get any usable error messages too....
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