PC boots straight to BIOS screen

I got a call from a frantic friend trying to install a new video card he received for Christmas. He said all he did was remove the old card and drivers and installed the new one. When he booted the PC, it went straight to BIOS setup with the CPU speed highlighted. When he tries to exit out of BIOS it reboots and he ends up at the same screen again. I had him shut off the machine and reseat the memory and all the cards but this did not help. For some reason it looks like it thinks the cpu speed is incorrect. This is an Asus A7V8X-X mainboard with 512 meg PC2700 memory and an AMD XP2600+ Barton core cpu. Bios reports the cpu speed at 2083mhz. Does anyone have any idea why this would suddenly happen and how he could fix it?

 

Pull ALL the plugs from the back of the computer and then clear CMOS.
Plug everything back in and turn that baby on. That should cure it FOR SURE.

 

According to asus: "When the system hangs due to overclocking failure, there is no need to open the case to clear CMOS data. Simply power off and restart the system and the BIOS will automatically restore the CPU default setting for each parameter. "
The 2600+ is being overclocked. It should run at 1.9Ghz.
The BIOS is at fault. It may need to be flashed if things continue the way they're going.

 

Hi BillB.

Sounds like a problem with the new video card. You might suggest reinserting the old card and booting up. If it boots ok it might be a problem with the new card. Everything else in the computer should be ok if all he did was replace the card and boot. He could have disturbed something else while changing the card but unlikely.

giles

 

Thanks for all the replies guys. I kind of thought that the cpu speed was incorrect, my brother-in-law has a machine with the same board and processor and I had him check his. His is running at 1917mhz and runs fine. I'm going to check the BIOS level today and flash it if it's not current. Hopefully that will take care of it, with Award BIOS you have to reset it to defaults and reboot after flashing.

Giles,

I thought about that and I had him put the old video card back in, but it did the same thing. I'm thinking it may be BIOS related but it's strange that it just started when he changed out the video card. I'll post back after checking BIOS levels and flashing if needed.

Thanks again for the replies.

 

The problem is resolved. The BIOS was about 4 versions behind, so I flashed it with the latest available, changed the cpu speed to 1917mhz and all is well. I don't understand how installing the new video card caused this to happen, unless he did more than he was telling me. But, it's running again with the new video card and he's a happy camper.

Thanks again for all the replies.

 

Thanks loads for the update.

 

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