Hi, I'm trying to repair a computer and unfortunately, it seems to be getting worse. I'm doing some development work in rural South Africa and when people learned I can fix (most) computers, they started bringing me lots of them and I fix them for free. One somewhat decent (comparatively) computer was brought to me yesterday and they complained they had viruses. That's very normal here. When I went to boot, it got to a windows login screen and mentioned some memory errors, etc., etc., and kept giving warnings of various types. I thought maybe some windows files were missing or corrupted, so I rebooted and tried to boot from CD to go to the Windows XP recovery and repair console. Apparently it wasn't in the right boot priority order and skipped any options to load from CD, so I tried again to reboot and load the BIOS. Unfortunately it was password protected and no one knew the password so I couldn't change the settings to allow it to boot from CD. So, without too many other options, I decided to reformat the hard drive and re-install windows by plugging the hard drive into another computer. That went just fine, apparently the hard drive is working just great. However, when I plugged the hard drive back into the original computer it would load the BIOS and everything else and then automatically reboot. It would then get as far as the "choose type of boot" screen where you can choose "safe mode", "last known good configuration", etc., but none of those options allowed the computer to continue to load windows, they always simply restarted the computer.
So, I decided to find a way to refresh the CMOS or BIOS and that might be where I ran into trouble. I unplugged all power connections from the power source and from the mobo. I even unplugged the CPU for a few minutes before putting it back. I unplugged the RAM, basically everything. I took out the little mobo system battery and I let it all sit unplugged overnight (except the CPU, that was only for a few minutes).
This morning, I replugged everything and then I went to reboot. The power lights come on, the system and CPU fans are working, but NOTHING is happening on the screen, no BIOS, no blinking cursor, nothing. I tried several different monitors just to be sure. They all act as if they're not receiving any signal. As far as I can tell, the hard drive and CD drive aren't responding to anything either.
The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-8I865GME-775 . Since looking around the internet, I tried to do the "CLR_CMOS" thing by putting the little jumper on it for 30 seconds and more. I've tried it multiple ways, with the power off, with the power plugged in, with the power turned on, etc. I'm still getting nothing, no signal, on the screen.
Please give me any advice you can! I don't think their computer was functional before they gave it to me, but at least they could see some windows screens and stuff even if they couldn't get it to do anything. I'd like to return it in full working order, but at least not worse than it came! Any help would be greatly appreciated!
So, I decided to find a way to refresh the CMOS or BIOS and that might be where I ran into trouble. I unplugged all power connections from the power source and from the mobo. I even unplugged the CPU for a few minutes before putting it back. I unplugged the RAM, basically everything. I took out the little mobo system battery and I let it all sit unplugged overnight (except the CPU, that was only for a few minutes).
This morning, I replugged everything and then I went to reboot. The power lights come on, the system and CPU fans are working, but NOTHING is happening on the screen, no BIOS, no blinking cursor, nothing. I tried several different monitors just to be sure. They all act as if they're not receiving any signal. As far as I can tell, the hard drive and CD drive aren't responding to anything either.
The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-8I865GME-775 . Since looking around the internet, I tried to do the "CLR_CMOS" thing by putting the little jumper on it for 30 seconds and more. I've tried it multiple ways, with the power off, with the power plugged in, with the power turned on, etc. I'm still getting nothing, no signal, on the screen.
Please give me any advice you can! I don't think their computer was functional before they gave it to me, but at least they could see some windows screens and stuff even if they couldn't get it to do anything. I'd like to return it in full working order, but at least not worse than it came! Any help would be greatly appreciated!