stuck on dell splash screen

K

kmkrreeves1

Member
First off don't yell at me for asking a question about such an old machine i just want to play around with linux and stuff, its not my primary computer.

This Dell optiplex gx110 will not boot past the splash screen. The loading bar usually gets half way or a quarter then stops. sometimes it will go far enough to tell me the time is wrong and configuration settings are incorrect but not often. (the reason the time and settings are wrong is because I removed the cmos battery)

I try to go fix the settings but it never gets far enough to let me. When it freezes you can hear a slight change in the overall sound it makes (like fans and stuff it sounds like it slowed down or got out of a bine or something) when i do make it to the bios settings the clock stops when everything freezes, but if its on the black screen with a blinking cursor the cursor never stops blinking.

I have tries taking out the HDD and changing ram, and leaving out the pci video card to no avail. The only thing that seems to change anything is leaving out the cmos battery, it doesn't fix anything just seems to change the amount of time before it hangs. I checked the battery with a meter and it was 2.95 out of 3 volts so i wouldn't think its the problem.

someone said it could be the PSU should i even bother borrowing one (all my other computers are laptops), but most people said motherboard which i would agree with (I found one for 15$)

I do remember when i first got it (was said to be broken) I changed a setting in the bios called video DAC snoop to off and it worked fine.

PLEASE HELP.

(forgot to mention ran windows xp pro sp3 but was originally 2000)
 
It also sometime said previous attempts to boot failed at checkpoint *krst
*krst varied between mem3, poke, crt?, start, a@, and some others i don't remember all exactly and it hasn't been showing these recently
 
tried another battery, it wasn't the exact same size but I switched them and they were the same voltage and the computer battery worked in the little remote i tried it in. And the computer had no change. I guess I'll still look for an exact match, but do you think it would make any difference
 
You need to use the same type of battery. So you can access the bios with no issue correct? You may have a bad hard drive or just corrupt OS install. Have you tested the hard drive to make sure its ok?
 
NO, I can rarely get into the bios, and when I do the clock immediately freezes and the computer is unresponsive, I have to hold down the power button for 5 sec for it to turn off. ctrl alt delete does nothing.

I did find the same 2032 battery in my car lock remote and switched them out and same thing. One time I got it to show an 8602 auxiliary device failure, along with all the other warnings about time and incorrect configuration. This is strange because after looking this up it is a mouse error, and i don't even have a mouse plugged in.
 
Try resetting the cmos on the motherboard. Do this by removing the cmos battery, unplugging power from the power supply, press the power button on the case a few times and then wait 5 minutes. Then reinsert battery and reconnect power and try booting up. If you still have the same issue, then you need a new motherboard.
 
maybe the BIOS file is corrupted, like it had been updating and someone switched it off or something. Have you put in the new board yet?
 
I still haven't bought a new MOBO but I have recently added a new graphics card (none before), a usb 2.0 pci card, upgraded ram, tried a new HDD which was bad (plugged in two HDDs at same time). and I noticed after taking everything out of the computer that makes noise (cpu fan, HDD) and when it freezes the power supply sound changes (whether its the fan or something else i don't know) I think I may have overloaded it with all the new hardware. Is it possible I overloaded the power supply? It say max continuous output power shall not exceed 110W.
 
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I checked the voltage on the current one and it's fine. I would get a better psu, but this computer is the small form factor version (2 pci ports 1 HDD bay 1 cd bay and 1 floppy, no AGP) so since there is no room to expand or add anything without removing something else, I'm not really sure why they even bothered to put an extra power plug. And to add to that it has a whacky psu in the front of the computer with the plugin port on a wire that runs across to the back. (the replacement psu was 150$ just because it weird and you can't really get an upgrade)

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I didn't put the head, That was just the best pic i could find without taking it myself
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put in new motherboard with all old hardware, worked great. So after that i shut it down and put in a new pentium 3 processor I bought for it, it didn't work, which I figured, there are settings I thought I would have to change. But when i put the old processor back, it did the same thing the other one was doing. I looked at everything and the new 1.4ghz pentium 3 processor is 1.45v and the old 800mhz pentium 3 is 1.7v. Please tell me there is a way to fix it. (that new processor is what killed the old one)
 
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Like i said its not my main computer i just want it to play with linux, and the new motherboard fixed it but when i put in a new processor it screwed up the new board too.
 
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