[SOLVED] Old desktop computer hardware (possibly) problem

[Peteosborn]

Hi everyone! I decided to give a second life to my old desktop computer. At first when I tried to boot it I didn’t any video output. I tried to check if all the cables were plugged correctly (and I believe they are) and tried to remove and clean out the RAM. As soon as I have put them back and turned on the computer, it had started to beep, it basically was one long beep and another longer beep, so I figured it was a memory problem. I removed again the ram and used some sort of electronic cleaning product that is made for this purpose, and I have put back only one RAM, to confirm that the problem was indeed coming from there. I startup the computer and I get a video output, so I thought that everyone was working correctly. But here is the thing, I got this screen

first and then the normal HP screen

and the computer keeps on rebooting at this point. The thing that is strange is that sometimes I get beyond the hp screen to get this

and this

and it stays for like half a second, it is really fast. Some other time I get the classic windows recovery screen

and disappears instantly. When I tried to press F10 to access the BIOS most of the time I get accessing setup on the bottom left corn of the screen and the computer reboots. When I successfully access the BIOS it stays on the settings screen for up to 6 or 7 seconds and then goes back to the boot loop. At this point I don’t understand what is going on. I tried to explain everything as best as I could and I would like to apologize for my bad english! Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Peteosborn]

Also, I should mention that I was able to capture the main settings panel of the BIOS, so here it is

 

[BFG-9000]

You see that goofy looking symbol under Secondary Slave instead of "None"?

It means there is a second hard disk in there with firmware so corrupted that it cannot even display the name of the drive in the BIOS. Unplug it.

In order to save money, drive manufacturers put the firmware on a service track of the disk instead of flash, and if anything happens to that, then usually the BIOS just stops booting right there at drive detection. Of course if Windows decided to install the boot partition to that drive then your Windows won't be bootable once it's removed, but at least then you could boot to install media.

BTW your DDR2-400 is too slow to run at 533 FSB so that could be it too

 

[Peteosborn]

You see that goofy looking symbol under Secondary Slave instead of "None"?

It means there is a second hard disk in there with firmware so corrupted that it cannot even display the name of the drive in the BIOS. Unplug it.

In order to save money, drive manufacturers put the firmware on a service track of the disk instead of flash, and if anything happens to that, then usually the BIOS just stops booting right there at drive detection. Of course if Windows decided to install the boot partition to that drive then your Windows won't be bootable once it's removed, but at least then you could boot to install media.

Thank you for your reply! The thing is that I didn’t see anything other than the hard drive and the optical drive when I looked inside of it. Those are the two only things that are connected through sata on the motherboard

 

[BFG-9000]

Then it's probably unstable and imagining the 2nd disk.

See, desktop Intel chipsets cannot run RAM slower than the FSB so your 4 x 266 = 1066 CPU is overclocking your PC2-3200 DDR2-400 to PC2-4200 DDR2-533 speeds. See if one of the sticks is rated higher, and try just that one

 

[Peteosborn]

Then it's probably unstable and imagining the 2nd disk.

See, desktop Intel chipsets cannot run RAM slower than the FSB so your 4 x 266 = 1066 CPU is overclocking your PC2-3200 DDR2-400 to PC2-4200 DDR2-533 speeds. See if one of the sticks is rated higher, and try just that one

Sorry but Im not really comfortable with all this, so here are the sticks that were used on the computer

 

[Peteosborn]

Sorry but Im not really comfortable with all this, so here are the sticks that were used on the computer

And the one that I was using out of the 4 sticks is the DDR2 800.

 

[BFG-9000]

Hmm, I wonder why the HP BIOS is recognizing it as PC2-3200 then. More than likely the SPD table in the RAM doesn't list any timings for 266 speeds

What happens when you only use one stick of Qimonda (the ones labelled PC2-5300)?

 

[Peteosborn]

Hmm, I wonder why the HP BIOS is recognizing it as PC2-3200 then. More than likely the SPD table in the RAM doesn't list any timings for 266 speeds

What happens when you only use one stick of Qimonda (the ones labelled PC2-5300)?

So last night I tried to remove the battery on the motherboard and unplugged the power cord, and this is morning with the PC2-5300 stick installed I tried to boot it and got a black screen that said something like boot disk failed please insert and press enter. But now it just got back to the usual boot loop. I was able to access the hard drive through my laptop (with a usb to sata cable) and was thinking if it was possible to do something from there?