This is a good one!

[TheLeviathan]

My sister mentioned her comp was not working properly so I said that I would fix it. It is an old (1998) Gateway and the hard drive was full of junk, lots of missing files at boot from poorly uninstalled junkware and Win98 had been on there since 1998! So I suggested a full restore and she agreed. She brought the box to my house and I have an old monitor and keyboard that I plugged in to start the restore.

First thing I did was take the cover off and clean out the dust. Then booted it up, except it did not boot! NO video signal to the monitor.
So I recheck all the cards and power connectors thinking I had bumped one loose somewhere but still NO boot. It was not even hitting the floppy.

So then I am thinking that since I did not put on the static strap and I used a vaccum instead of compressed air, that I fried something like the onboard video chip, or wiped ths BIOS.

I run to town and get a cheapo PCI video card and throw in and still NO boot.

Oh boy.

So I change a jumper on the board (after many hours on the net looking for Gateway BX440 boards) to enable BIOS flashing with special software that I downloaded.

NO boot.

Oh man.

So by now I figure the mainboard is toast so I tell my sister that she needs a new one. All she wanted was to clear up some slow down in her old PC!
A new board and HSF and New power supply, I tell her. I say that I have an "old" Duron 700 that she can have. So she says "OK, I need to upgrade anyway."


So I order the stuff online and take out everything except the board and CPU.
Decide to try and boot one more time.
Board beeps from no DIMM.
Put Dimm back in.
Board boots up fine and says "Boot error etc."
So I start plugging stuff back together one at a time.


IT WAS THE KEYBOARD!!!

Would not work with the keyboard plugged in. Oh boy!

So I call my sister and she says OK to upgrade anyhow.

All comments are welcome.

Just to make this more interesting---I got the A+ cert last week!

 

[BreakApart]

Seen it before...

AFTER i found the keyboard was the problem the owner told me "ohh yea, my son washed the keyboard last weekend, IN THE DISHWASHER!"


Ba$7#rd failed to mention this before i went searching for the problem.

 

[Mitzi]

I've had same the problem when I plugged the PS/2 keyboard in the PS/2 mouse port and vise versa - the machine just would not boot - took about hour an hour for me to realise

Glad you got it in the end

 

[XeonTux]

I've had same the problem when I plugged the PS/2 keyboard in the PS/2 mouse port and vise versa - the machine just would not boot - took about hour an hour for me to realise

I have ran into that many times, believe it or not, when ppl thik they know how to hook up a PC. Often it POSTs and boots to the windows 98 splash screen, then just hangs there forever with the scroller at the bottom moving. Or will freeze in the middle of booting a DOS disk.

The first two times I saw this it took a little while to figure out, now it is the first thing I check if a system exhibits these symptoms.

This is a good tip to keep in the back of your head!


This is one of those "ID-TEN-T" errors

(ID10T)