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Callistra

I’m working on a friend’s 8200. The psu powers up but the machine shows no signs of attempting to boot. Diagnostic lights on the back say that “Memory failed to be sized or enabled.” HOWEVER, there are four sticks of ram in this system. I pulled them all out and tried putting them in one by one and the error persists for all. Feeling that it would be highly unlikely for 4 sticks of ram to go at once, I decided to see what would happen if I plugged in the power cord with no ram in at all. The same dialogistic lights come on even though according to Dell a different set of lights is supposed to come on for no ram detected at all. So apparently not even the lights are working properly. There are a total of ten beeps which occur as well. They are not in steady rhythm though. There are 5, 2, 2, and then 1 with a slight pause in between each. According to Dell technical documents 5 beeps is not an option so I’m going for 10 which means “A CMOS shutdown register test error occurred.”

My thoughts.. battery on the motherboard needs to be replaced.. or motherboard is dead. Yours?

ih8bills

Your CMOS battery would not cause ALL your RAM sticks to fail @ once.
It will boot with a totally dead battery-- it just won't remember any settings

I think it's a dead mobo

Callistra

Okay this is what I did.. I replaced the battery and I got some action on the screen. It told me there was a memory read error in a certain sector. I had different diagnostic lights come on this time saying "IDE bus failure has occurred". I shut off the machine and turned it back on and now the original two lights saying the ram problem are back on and now i have ELEVEN beeps which is supposed to mean "An invalid BIOS is installed." Also no more info on the screen.. monitor says it's not connected like it did before I replaced the battery.

I will try swapping out a psu. I'm pretty sure I have my old one around here somewhere.. But I'm really starting to feel the bad mobo now.