PC Related - nearly had another heart attack

I had turned off my computer via normal shutdown. When I turned it on, I had the nasty experience of hearing Error beeps and the BIOS Checksum error message on the screen. This is a new motherboard. After several resets, I decided to turn it off and wait a bit. I turned it back on and it booted fine. however, when I got into my OS, I noticed the time was set at midnight, January 1, 2002. So I rebooted and reset the time in BIOS and now everything is okay.

Anyone else experience this???

Although I am no expert, I will try to hazard
a guess: perhaps one of your memory chips is
flaky. Some computers, in order to gain maximum
speed, copy their BIOS from ROM (read-only
memory) to RAM (random-access memory). If the
copy somehow went wrong, then the checksum
test would fail (checksums are a quick way to
see if copied data matches the original).
Perhaps it could be temperature related
memory failure? This can account for the
boot-up process working most of the time.

nisshin

Thanks. Could be. Who knows. It is the first time I have experienced this one. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon3.gif

I normally leave my system on, though I turn my TFT monitor off when I leave the computer for a while.

Make sure everything is seated well. The heat can cause things to expand, and while they may contact well enough to keep going, on a reboot or shutdown they cause problems.

bad memory chips are a lot more common than people think. Most systems to a memory check on boot and will fail to startup, or at least flash error messages at you.

I would open the thing up and carefully remove and replace the memory chips cleaning out the connectors as I go (don't use a q-tip that will leave cotton stuck to the connectors, just blow it out /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif ) if it still won't boot also reseat any cards you've got in there.

Finally you should remove the memory chips one at a time until you find the one that has the problem. (If that is the problem) I've had to do that before, see if you can boot without one chip, but not with it in there.

Good Luck

If it was a new board, the clock may have had NO time setting at all.
This may cause an error. Once it was powered up, and had its error, it set the clock to a default value. My guess is this was a one time thing.

Any chance that the battery jumper on the motherboard was disabled for shipping? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif

ivebuiltmany pc,s i never saw a cmops jumper in off postion but on some ecs boards ive seena a weak conection under battery i just bended metal part up a tad allwas well do it carefully if ya do it

I have been using this Chaintech 7VJL Deluxe Apogee mobo for a few months now. When I built the system, I made darn sure everything was seated properly. I had 4 x 256 MB DDR333 installed and removed one for the sake of Win98SE.

It may well be an expansion/contraction issue or a flakey ram module. It might be the CMOS battery. I am not going to bother with it right now as it is running fine.

that happens once in a while with my ECS motherboard.
I reset the cpu settings in the bios and fix the time and date. eventually, I'll get around to seating the memory or changing the battery.
Weird because I'm using memory from Micron Crucial. just one stick.

I just right now had this happen to me.. right after reading this thread and needing to restart to install something... January 1, 2002.. midnight.. amazing coincidence? I just installed another 512 MB stick of ram so I'm at a full gigabyte. Perhaps I need to reseat it as well..

Ya know that 'almost' sounds like my problem I had about a week and a half ago. I was using my computer. Monitor went blank so I figured random reboot.. lookd down at the computer and the cdrom light was blinking like it usually does. So I sat and waited.. and waited.. and waited. Monitor never came back up (light kept blinking saying it had no signal). So I finally reached down and hit the reset button.

Monitor came back on, it counted down memory and detected drives. Ater it finished detecting drives it came up with:

CMOS Checksum Error.
Press F1 to continue or DEL to enter setup.

It would not accept any keyboard input and all during bootup it was beeping like you were hitting keys on the keyboard. It was not any beep code as these were too random. I switched guts from that computer to a different computer. The problem computer now has a different video card, different stick of ram, different keyboard, and the same floppy drive. Still gives me the CMOS error.

So far..

I have changed the CMOS battery
Cleared the CMOS with the jumper for up to a minute (supposed to be 10 secs).
I have tried moving the RAM to all three memory slots.
Tried booting without the floppy drive attached.

I have taken the MB out and cleaned it off with a can of air. I have lookd it over and can't find anything wrong with it. So far I'm stumped and very annoyed. I can't figure out whats wrong.

Amazing coincidence, Stockwiz.

K A, in my case it wanted a boot floppy, which it read, then started accessing one of the 3 HDDs, then just sat there.

Well, at least I am not the only one this sort of error has happened to.

Memtest86

Burn a CD with their ready-made bootable ISO file, and run it overnight to catch any tricky errors. The BIOS test is very rudimentary and doesn't catch everything.

open the case and look for pregnant caps.
seeing a bunch lately.
badcaps