Is this toasted? (Gateway stuck at bios screen)

[Ummon]

I had this on and inserted memory. It turned off and I smelled something, well, you know. When I turn it on now, regardless of memory used, it gives four beeps. Heheheh, does this mean it's toast?



(original post)

I picked up a cheap PIII. Turns out it's a Gateway. It sticks at the bios screen. Number lock will toggle, though. If I press F1, it says 'preparing to enter settings....' and just hangs there. If I press tab at the bios screen, it shows the system messages and then stays there. Number lock still toggles - till I press another key. I took the battery out and unplugged the unit. Upon restarting, it auto-powers on, but I get the same behavior. Does anyone have any ideas?

[havic626]

may be a corupt bios......or board is dead

[SGT]

If you haven't already:

Unplug all devices from the board including, the IDE cables to the hard drive and the cd rom.  Unplug the floppy cable.  Remove any boards such as modems, nics, etc....  With only memory, cpu, power, mouse, and keyboard plugged in, does it hang at the bios?  If it has two memory sticks, try each of the sticks by themselves.

[headkaze]

Maybe try resetting the BIOS. This usually requires moving a jumper on the motherboard, powering on and off, then moving the jumper back.

[Ummon]

Well, I tried both of these. No change. In the first case, all the memory seems good. At least it's all counted.  In the second case, there were two places there were jumpers - three pins of which two had a jumper on them, and six pins of which two jumpers were on those. Tried removing and replacing both with no change, although with the first jumper removed, there was no display, whereas with the other two jumpers removed there was. I don't know. This computer was an NT workstation. Maybe there's some proprietary or/and oem thing going on as the original hd is missing?

[Encryptor]

Do the floppy lights or hard drive lights come on at all? A lot of pc's will hang there if the hard drive has issues. Did you try more than one drive?

If the floppy light comes on you could prep a disk on another pc and try to flash the BIOS with what ever the latest version is.

Encryptor

[BradC]

To clarify what headkaze said and what you did, you don't just look for a random jumper and remove it. Look on Gateway's website for that model of computer, or the motherboard manufacturer's website for that motherboard. In the technical documentation you should be able to find where the BIOS clear or reset setting is. Sometimes it is simply removing a jumper, but sometimes you have to move it to a different position instead of removing it completely. Try both.

To me it sounds like it's a corrupt BIOS and with a computer that old it probably doesn't have a recovery function built in which means it's likely dead. If the motherboard isn't a proprietary shape/size then you could replace it.

[Ummon]

To clarify what headkaze said and what you did, you don't just look for a random jumper and remove it. Look on Gateway's website for that model of computer, or the motherboard manufacturer's website for that motherboard. In the technical documentation you should be able to find where the BIOS clear or reset setting is. Sometimes it is simply removing a jumper, but sometimes you have to move it to a different position instead of removing it completely. Try both.

To me it sounds like it's a corrupt BIOS and with a computer that old it probably doesn't have a recovery function built in which means it's likely dead. If the motherboard isn't a proprietary shape/size then you could replace it.

I looked at Gateway and nothing came up. I thought I googled it. Turns out some other company is handling support. I found the pdf manual, but nothing on the bios. It doesn't even show the inside of each model. I usually reset the bios by unplugging and pulling the battery. It seems to work in this case, since it auto-powers on after pluging back in, but since it's hanging maybe it is corrupt.


@Encryptor: The drive works in my PII so I would think it's fine. The hd drive light is not going on, but that shouldn't matter for the bios to load, should it? I don't even have any floppies around. Haven't used them in over ten years. Maybe a cd instead? The cd drive does work. But since it won't get far enough to try to boot even, I don't know if that would work?


By the way, the pdg says this:

"When you turn on your computer, the power-on self-test (POST) routine
checks the system memory and components. To see this information on the
screen, press TAB during POST. Press ESC to bypass the remaining
memory count."

However, ESC has no effect in this circumstance. Further,

"The system displays an error message if POST finds any problems. Write
down the error message that appears. See the “Troubleshooting” chapter of
Maintaining and Troubleshooting Your E-4200 System for a description of
error messages."

But it sees all memory and both cd and hd drives, and there are no error messages.