No signal to monitor after resetting bios battery

[Deathykins]

I want to start off by saying that I know very little about computer hardware, so please talk to me like I am a complete novice.

I was playing a game with a friend, and my PC suddenly shut off and would not turn back on. My friend brought up that taking the bios battery out and putting it back in may fix it, and I followed their instructions. I had to remove my GPU to do this as the battery was behind it. Since doing this, the PC is turning on. The GPU is turning on as the fans on it are spinning. But I am getting no signal to the monitor.

My friend is no longer online so I am unable to ask them for advice, and I am very worried that I may have done something to harm my GPU and do not have the money to replace it currently.

 

[alexoiu]

What motherboard using? Is the monitor connected to the motherboard, or the graphics card?

 

[Deathykins]

My motherboard is: MSI H61MU-E35

I've tried connecting the monitor to both the motherboard and the GPU and neither one is giving the monitor a picture.

 

[mjslakeridge]

Is there a button on your monitor to enter setup mode? If so try that and see if the monitor is still working.

 

[Deathykins]

There is but the only setup options it had was to swap between PC and AV. Neither had any change.

 

[mjslakeridge]

Ok, so your monitor is not dead. That is good. When you removed the CMOS battery, did you also unplug the computer from the wall socket? Leave the battery out for 5 minutes or so. Since you have a dedicated graphics card, your motherboard GPU was probably disabled in Device manager. That would explain why trying that didn't work.

 

[Deathykins]

I did unplug it. What could I do to re-enable it?

 

[mjslakeridge]

Well, since you can't see anything on the monitor at this time, going into Device manager isn't an option. You may be able to boot into safe mode (check your motherboard manual to see what key to press on the keyboard -maybe F8) and then get into Device manager. When you reinstalled the GPU, are you sure it is properly seated in the slot, and all cables are properly connected?

 

[Deathykins]

I've taken the card back out and put it back in to make sure its seated properly and I believe it is. As for booting into safe mode, the manual says Delete to ender setup or F11 to enter boot menu. Would it be the boot menu in this case? Also, should I have the monitor connected to the motherboard for this?

 

[mjslakeridge]

I am afraid I am not going to be much help here, since I am not familiar with that motherboard and it's BIOS (Setup) options. Try connecting the monitor to the motherboard, and try entering setup. There may be an option to restore optimized defaults in the BIOS. Hopefully some else jumps in here with more expertise. What version of Windows are you using?

 

[Deathykins]

I've tried connecting via the motherboard, but even so, I'm getting no signal to the monitor to know if I've made it into the setup or not. And I'm on Windows 7 64-bit.

 

[mjslakeridge]

If you reboot and hit F11 to enter boot menu, what are the options, if you can see any on the screen? Once you power up the computer, keep hitting F11 about once a second for 30 seconds or so. If nothing comes up, I am about out of ideas.

 

[Deathykins]

There's still just nothing coming up. Thank you for taking the time to try to help me, though.

 

[mjslakeridge]

You are welcome.

The only other thing I would try would be to remove the GPU, boot from a Linux disk (you probably don't have one) or boot from the original Windows 7 installation disk, and try a repair of Windows or complete reinstallation of Windows. If that worked, you would be back to where at least you could use the onboard graphics, and then work towards getting the graphics card drivers loaded.