Is It The Motherboard?

Hi! It's been awhile since I was here last, but have run into some problems and needed advice.

I have an older PC, running windows 7 pro. It has an ASRock motherboard(n68pv-gs) and an AMD Athlon chip 7750 dual core 2.5, 750 G HD. The whole thing was built about 10 years ago, although I've messed with it a little over the years. One thing I did recently was dual boot it with Linux Mint Cinnamon for internet exposure after win7 goes bye bye. I have a lot of win 7 programs and games and wish to keep it running if I can.

Anyway, about four weeks ago, it started to have problems with the clock not keeping the setting and having a long, long POST, about a minute or so, strange because it has always fired right up. I looked up the problem and went out and bought a new battery for it and installed it. No luck. It still was having problems on the startup, having to press F2 then esc to get past the POST screen. Also, the GRUB boot was not always kicking in to display the OS choices, it would tell me no OS was installed.

Does this sound like a motherboard or chip problem? Or are some other things I can look at before going so far as to replace them? Could it be the dual boot? Do I need to figure out removing it? (If I can ever get it running again, of course) The parts concerned are not too expensive but I don't want to purchase them if I don't need them.

Thanks in advance for your insight!

 

Clock setting is often the cmos battery -Could try another (not unusual to have duff new one)
No operating system----Could be hard drive failure, or, boot corruption.
I have little experience with grub, so perhaps someone else might be of help with that.
If you have a spare hard drive- try installing linux/windows, on that first

 

At 10 years old, I'd say that your CMOS battery is the first place to start. It's about the size and shape of a quarter. Replace it, go into BIOS, put your settings back the way that they should be, and see if your PC works normally now.

 

@Mister Krinkle: Already replaced the battery first thing, but I didn't check bios settings, I did leave it booting from USB first in case I needed to go back in and tweak anything on the installation. Perhaps I need to make sure it's booting from the drive. I'll try that, thanks.

@baklogic , thanks for the idea. I do have a second HD inthe machine with enough room for windows. I'll try loading an OS on that and see what happens. Thanks

 

Ooops, sorry, missed the part about replacing the battery.

Check the capacitors on the motherboard to see if any of them have bulging or crusty tops (go to Google images and search for "bad capacitors" to see what I'm talking about).

 

Well, perhaps it was a dud replacement battery among other things. I managed to change some settings in bios and put in (another) battery... basically the computer equivalent of jiggling the handle... and I have it up again. We'll see how it goes and if it can start up consistently.

I will check out the motherboard for any damage tho, thanks @Mister Krinkle. This machine was in storage for awhile and I haven't looked too closely for damage to the insides since I got it going again several months ago. Hopefully all is well.

Thank you everyone for your insight!