Old Computer Stuck on Checking NVRAM

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Baez

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Well I have a customer's old AMD Duron 1300MHz computer here. First time I booted it up it ran fine and got the screen of "Boot disk failure press any key to try again". I restart it to change the boot sequence in BIOS so that it boots from the hard drive. But it gets stuck on "Checking NVRAM" after the reboot. So these are things I've tried so far to solve the problem in this order:

- reseated RAM
- changed IDE cable
- switched HD molex
- removed floppy power
- reset CMOS

After the CMOS reset I don't even get a boot screen. The next thing I was going to try was installing a different RAM module but it's tough when it doesn't even boot anymore! There is no speaker on this motherboard or case so it's impossible to use beeps.
 
Silly to ask but the only two things that spring to mind, which i see that you've tried are a bad IDE cable or some bad RAM.

May be worth just double checking and checing RAM stick by stick.

EDIT: Found this reply somewhere else;

Disconnect all cables, Floppy Drive IDE Check the Memory SDRAM make sure all DIMMS are in place.
Go to CMOS settings.
Go to STANDARD SETTINGS
SET All to AUTO
DETECT ALL IDE DRIVES.
HIT SKIP FOR CD ROM
SAVE AND EXIT.
 
Well I would be able to starting diagnosing but I can't even see the boot screen anymore so I don't know what to do! I'm using on board video right now so I'm thinking I'll try out a AGP card. Don't really have one I can use here though.
 
You probly already tried but make sure you pull the battery before you do the bios reset . Had the similar probs with those old boards. If you get bios back there shouldbe an option to" skip certain checks so the system boots faster " or something like that. Had one here that was stuck on ckecking nvram. Had 384mb in it, would just keep running nvram over and over, get to 384 and start again. That what you mean when you say yours was stuck ? Disconnect the cdroms. Just have hard and floppy and try connecting the hard drive cable to the other connector on the board. MAY SOUND ROUGH BUT I once fixed this by spraying the memsticks with CRC AND IT FIXED IT . just not making good connection and had to give them a wriggle. Definatly sounds mem stick related. All so similar. I would try to get it back with minimal memory 1 128 or 1 256. Some of them oldies if you try to run 512mb they just keep rebooting over and over. Hope you get it sorted.
 
Hey I'm back. Was gone all weekend :).

Anyway I'll try a couple of the things you suggested bruno and get back here. A couple I've already tried and no luck.
 
Disconnected the drives and it did nothing. I just realized this thing takes SDRAM instead of DDR and I have no other sticks of that lying around. Checked a few places online and that stuff is expensive now! I can get 2 gigs of DDR2-800 OCZ Platinum for the same price of 256 megs of SDRAM.

I hoping it's either RAM or the hard drive and not the boards controller. I'm going to clean the system out tomorrow and hope that it was just some dust that was interfering.
 
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