no input signal

[pepchew]

I built a system for a friend with an Albatron K8M800-754 motherboard and a Sempron 2600+ CPU. We put the system together this past winter and got it up and running smoothly. My friend has had no problems until he just returned home from a 7-week vacation. He plugged in his computer, turned it on and got a "no input signal" message.

I had him disconnect everything from the back and plug it all back in making sure everything was well connected (especially the monitor connection). No go.

The motherboard seems to be getting power (fans, hard drive light and noise, light on board etc.). I had him unplug and refasten a few of the components inside but to no avail.

He is using the onboard video. Could this have just "gone" on him?

Also, I read on an online forum that it could be a problem related the CMOS battery? Is this possible (I really have no idea about this)?

Anyhow, I am going to make the long trek to his home and try the following things:

-check the monitor (only 6 months old) with my laptop
-try the system with one of my video cards
-try swaping his memory with my own

Any suggestions as to other tests I could run myself would be greatly appreciated. We bought all the hardware at a shop in Tokyo. They have always been extremely helpful but it’s a great distance for both of us to travel, so hopefully we can find a simple solution.

Remember, all he did was unplug it and go on vacation!

Thanks in advance!

 

[Impotence]

This has happend to me before!

Ok, "no input signal" means that the screen is not recieving a signal from the graphics card (or the monitor is broken).

Is the monitor displaying anything when the computer is turned on (such as the boot up screens?)

Has the graphics card got a tv out? is so Plug a tv into it! (my G force card used to make the tv the primary display whenever i fiddled with my computer)

If you can get into the bios then make sure that the first display device it set to your onboard video.

If its a new motherboard i doubt the CMOS battery would have died (they last for years), the battery supplies power to a small amount of memory on you mainboard that stores the settings for your bios... if the battery did run out you would lose your settings every time you turned your computer off.

If the computer is beeping when you turn it on, lookup what the beeps mean in the motherboards manual (or if your board is made by MSI, Plug in the D- Bracket [it has 4 led's and 2 usb ports]... depending on what is happening the led's light up in diffrent combinations)

My guess is that the monitor is fine, try plugging another graphics card into your motherboard.

 

[pepchew]

Thanks for the advice. As it turns out you had most of the problem nailed.

I got to my friend's place and the first thing we did was try a new battery. No go. Tried alternative memory. Nothing. Tried putting in a video card and bingo -well, almost. We had video but we could only get so far as a message stating that there was a checksum error in the BIOS. To make a long story short, we downloaded a copy of his BIOS and flashed the chip. It worked. We had the system back up and running. It would seem that the onboard video is fried, but what was the issue with the BIOS? And why did the video suddenly burn out after having been unplugged for several weeks? Who knows? Let's just hope that he doesn't go on vacation again anytime soon!