EggXpert

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My son’s system is:

Asus M4A78 Plus

Athlon II X2 250

AMD retail cpu cooler

Sapphire HD4830 video card

2 - 2GB OCZ PC2 6400 "SLI Ready Edition" DIMM's

2 - 160GB SATAII Barracudas

Thermaltake TR2 RX-450 power supply

Sony DVD burner

Airlink 101 Super G wireless PCI adapter

ECS card reader

Combo floppy drive (disconnected)

generic tower case

 

This evolution has been running 32-bit XP Pro with no problems for the past few months.  A few settings in BIOS or some of the ATI Catalyst Control Center adjustments might have been tweaked, but nothing was over-clocked.  (I blew out the old power supply letting the video card setup utility see what the optimal settings should be.)  I installed 64-bit Windows 7 as a dual boot setup a few days ago with no problems.  However, there was no driver that I could find for the wireless card, so there was no internet access.  I found some 64-bit Asus drivers and left the system while it was extracting the contents of one of the zip files.  When I returned, the system seemed dead.

 

Power lights on the case, the psu, and the mobo are all on and a light on the video card and the keyboard lights were flashing.  A cold start will not even POST, but the fans and lights work.  I tried clearing the CMOS, several times, swapping around the memory, disconnecting everything except the CPU, and the results were the same.  The keyboard lights (on a year old HP multimedia keyboard) were flashing in what seemed to be a random pattern -- up to 6 times in a row.  An old IBM keyboard would not flash more than once at a time, at a longer interval.  On the chance that the keyboard flashing was similar to a beep code, I searched for some explanation and found nothing.  I contacted Sapphire tech support to see what they could tell me about the flashing light on the video card, which is labeled "over heat protect," and they said to RMA the video card.

 

To get by while waiting for the turn around, I bought a Galaxy GeForce 210, with the intent to put it in my system later.  The new video card made no difference – the system still won’t POST at all.  I hooked up a pair of speakers to see if there was a beep code that I couldn’t hear through the system speaker, and there was nothing.

 

I have a lot of spare parts, but just not the right ones to determine exactly what is wrong, so I took it to a computer shop to have then diagnose it.  I think that I can trust them, but I’ll have to see what they say.

 

Any thoughts on what the problem is?

This sounds frighteningly similar to my experience with an Asus board about three years back.

I set my tower up at a LAN party I was running, ran upstairs to get something, and when I got back, my screen saver was frozen on the screen and the LED lights in my keyboard were flashing erratically.  Holding the power button did nothing, so I turned it off using the switch on the Power Supply.

When I went to turn it back on, the fans spun up but nothing else happened.  It turns out that something caused a short in my southbridge, and my motherboard was fried.  My suggestion to you would be to inspect the chips on the motherboard and see if any of them are discolored or malformed.  Do you smell an electrical smoke smell when you turn the computer on? 

The light on the video card could also mean the PSU failed again, its not a very good model, you have another one to try?

Yet agree with above, try PSU first though, erratic power = erratic behavior

 

The shop said it's the motherboard, everything else is good.

you replied to mine...

my system stopped similar to yours. halloween night, left for a party, came back to it just sitting there in a blank screen idle.  nothing got it to come back up.  i used to run into this when i left it running F@H type processes on my HD4770.  but it would run normally after i reset it.  slight chance it's a bios problem cause my t-e had a bios update and a note on it was about s3 sleep problems.  just something i can't change now, but you might look into it.

I very recently had a very similar problem.  I was running a dual boot with Windows 7, had a hard lockup while playing WoW.  The system had been on for about thirty minutes and the game had been on for ten.  No combination of components would POST.  I found a single post somewhere that said there were some reported problems with this BIOS (Award, I think -- it's an ASUS A8N-E board) trying to start up when under-powered, and my UPS was acting peculiar (flashing light until I turned it off and back on), so I tried their recommendation: pull the CMOS battery and the power plug, wait a bit to make sure it's fully drained, then plug back in and start up.  Sure enough, it booted up just fine.  The problem is that it won't boot a second time without going through the same steps, no matter how long it has or hasn't been running.  I think, based on my limited understanding of these things, that this implies that the BIOS is fried at the least.  The fact that it runs fine otherwise makes me think that everything else is probably okay.

 So I have a new mainboard, CPU, PSU, and RAM on the way (since there's no such thing as a 939 mainboard anymore and I was due for an upgrade anyway).