Something I had never paid attention to before saved me from replacing my computer. The computer had progressively more symptoms of problems and I was convinced the motherboard was bad. The POST beep had expanded into a musical diddy that the AMI specs said indicated a motherboard problem. In an earlier post, I wrote about experiencing the atipcie.sys hangup. That, combined with lines flashing on the display during startup and the "bad motherboard" beeps seemed to point to the video going bad on the motherboard and giving the ATI driver indigestion.
I replaced the ATI video driver with the generic one from the computer manufacturer, which seemed to tolerate the "motherboard" problem (still had flashing lines on the display and a musical startup). Then I discovered that an external hard disk connected via firewire hung the startup if the drive was powered up before the computer (although it was after the computer in the boot order list). I replaced the firewire connection with a USB connection and the hanging went away; another work-around had delayed the need to replace the motherboard.
I ran every test I could lay my hands on, and everything said the motherboard and other hardware were fine. How could they be fine when the musical POST said otherwise? Answer: There is a BIOS setting I had never paid attention to. Under Advanced Options, you can set it to enumerate with a beep each USB device it finds during startup. I changed that to not enumerate the USB devices and now there is just the one, normal POST beep. No need to replace the motherboard.
I replaced the ATI video driver with the generic one from the computer manufacturer, which seemed to tolerate the "motherboard" problem (still had flashing lines on the display and a musical startup). Then I discovered that an external hard disk connected via firewire hung the startup if the drive was powered up before the computer (although it was after the computer in the boot order list). I replaced the firewire connection with a USB connection and the hanging went away; another work-around had delayed the need to replace the motherboard.
I ran every test I could lay my hands on, and everything said the motherboard and other hardware were fine. How could they be fine when the musical POST said otherwise? Answer: There is a BIOS setting I had never paid attention to. Under Advanced Options, you can set it to enumerate with a beep each USB device it finds during startup. I changed that to not enumerate the USB devices and now there is just the one, normal POST beep. No need to replace the motherboard.
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