Hi, hoping someone here can offer me a little help. Here's the situation.
I have an old P4 machine that I bought back in 2001. It's a Sony Vaio, Model # PCV-RX370DS. Somewhere along the line, I upgraded to 512MB of Samsung RAM, swapped in a GeForce FX video card, and added a second HDD. The machine was running Windows XP Pro, and worked fine from when I got it until I more or less shelved it for a new machine about 4 years ago. Since that time, I had put it in an old arcade cabinet I had laying around, and more or less used it as a dedicated MAME cabinet. It wasn't lightning fast, but it did the job.
Yesterday, I decided to back up everything on the HDD's, reformat, and re-appropriate it into a media center PC. Once I backed up the data onto my main PC, I reformatted the Vaio's two HDD's, and put them back in the case. This is where things get weird.
I plugged everything back in, turned it on, and everything went to crap. At first, all I would get is a continuous long beep, and nothing else. I tried a few different things, and the only way to get past the continuous beep was to pull one stick of RAM. After that, it seemed to boot more or less normally, or so I thought. I'm getting absolutely no video output. The fans are all starting, the HDD light is coming on, and the optical drives are both turning on. The video card has two VGA outputs and an S-Video output. None seem to work. I tried a video card out of another old box that still works fine. No luck, still not getting video.
So, to sum it up:
- Long continuous boot with 2 sticks of RAM, works when only 1 stick is in place.
- No video on boot, regardless of configuration, and when using a different card.
I am assuming I somehow fried the Mobo with a static charge of some sort. My only other idea is that the power supply is on it's way out. Any ideas?
I have an old P4 machine that I bought back in 2001. It's a Sony Vaio, Model # PCV-RX370DS. Somewhere along the line, I upgraded to 512MB of Samsung RAM, swapped in a GeForce FX video card, and added a second HDD. The machine was running Windows XP Pro, and worked fine from when I got it until I more or less shelved it for a new machine about 4 years ago. Since that time, I had put it in an old arcade cabinet I had laying around, and more or less used it as a dedicated MAME cabinet. It wasn't lightning fast, but it did the job.
Yesterday, I decided to back up everything on the HDD's, reformat, and re-appropriate it into a media center PC. Once I backed up the data onto my main PC, I reformatted the Vaio's two HDD's, and put them back in the case. This is where things get weird.
I plugged everything back in, turned it on, and everything went to crap. At first, all I would get is a continuous long beep, and nothing else. I tried a few different things, and the only way to get past the continuous beep was to pull one stick of RAM. After that, it seemed to boot more or less normally, or so I thought. I'm getting absolutely no video output. The fans are all starting, the HDD light is coming on, and the optical drives are both turning on. The video card has two VGA outputs and an S-Video output. None seem to work. I tried a video card out of another old box that still works fine. No luck, still not getting video.
So, to sum it up:
- Long continuous boot with 2 sticks of RAM, works when only 1 stick is in place.
- No video on boot, regardless of configuration, and when using a different card.
I am assuming I somehow fried the Mobo with a static charge of some sort. My only other idea is that the power supply is on it's way out. Any ideas?