mobo...cmos

I ran across a older comp..it is Intel Desktop mobo..D815EEA2...It has been sitting up for 5/6 months...so that means the battery is dead??....and if the battery is dead then the Cmos has been lost???..I replaced the battery and it did not respond....The only thing that i can see in activity is the CDrom blinking on start...the light comes on the front(activity light??) The light is a solid color not blinking and after a few minutes it will go off. The keyboard will flash on when the power is turned on and then go right back off. I took the memory out and it beeped 3 times
If the Cmos is dead ..can i bring it back??

 

If you've replaced the battery, your BIOS, (which is a CMOS chip) is okay. (Although, 5-6 months isn't a long time for a CMOS battery - they have a lifespan of approx. 3-5 years) Yes, you will have lost any settings on it, but they will simply return to defaults, and you should be able to change them back.

That is, once you've resolved the REAL issue.

You say the CD-ROM becomes active, and that's a good sign; the system is getting power.

What I would do in this situation is to strip the machine down to the absolute minimum. Take out RAM, Floppy, Hard drive, CD-ROM, and reseat the video card (you may also want to clean any contacts if the machine is dirty). Try booting. Your computer will scream bloody murder, but hopefully, we will be able to see video. If not, I would try testing with another video card to confirm that your existing one is dead. If we do have some luck, though, you can start rebuilding the machine piece by piece, until we find the faulting device, or we have completely reassembled the computer, and everything is working. (Sometimes parts just start making bad connections and cause these problems)

 

well i did as you said and put in another grapics card and the silly thing did the same thing.......any other thoughts??

 

Is it hooked up to a monitor you know is working?

 

The monitor works on every comp except this one

 

Can you tell us in detail what you've done so far?
I should've asked earlier whether you are using a video card, or an onboard adapter. Which is it?

 

Mada ...I did what you said....I was using the video card in the motherboard...then i use a pci card and the same thing.....nothing...I took every thing out the only thing plugged up is the mobo and the processor.

 

Okay, thing here is, you will have to disable the onboard video card before using the PCI card. (Sorry, I should have asked sooner) There should be an option in BIOS, under a section like "onboard devices", depending on your BIOS.

 

well if i could get into bios my probs would have been over long ago

 

does the desktop have an AGP slot on it? reason being, a lot of the time if it has onboard video and an agp slot you can reset the onboard video by installing an agp slot. I have AGP and PCI-express. Once my machine wouldn't come up so i took the pci-e card out and installed an agp card and it worked. it's worth a shot if you do have an agp slot.

 

Thinking back, if the keyboard flashes then doesn't that mean Bios is loading keyboard drivers for use in navigating bios? If you put a bootable CD in the CD-ROM does the CDROM activity light stay on longer than w/o anything in the drive?

I'm just trying to determine if the problem is video related rather than bios related.