A7V VIA 4way memory interleaving and CMOS

[Bartela]

here is the problem: i used the unofficial 4-way memory interleave *.vxd and *.dll through their native installer proggie. upon notice to reboot, i did so, and before entering the win2kSP2 OS, i played with CAS latency from 3 to 2 in the bios and set manual mem timings rather than SPD; i have 2 SDRAM PC133, 1 128MB and 1 256MB, running on the Asus A7V with an AMD Duron 650MHz. i have not been able to reboot since, and the only noise the computer was making were the cpu fan and the drives (2 hdds,1 dvdrom, 1 cdrw) plus a looping beeping. with some research, i think i have shorted the cmos chip and reset the bios and now it does not make the continuous sound though the drives don't even appear to initialize while receiving electricity. any ideas? please?!

[Wildman6971]

Try taking out the cmos battery and booting up pc to clear it out and restore the factory defaults.
Then turn off pc and put battery back in and take out 1 of them dimms while it's off too.
May have corrupted the registry in your OS , reformat would be the best solution there.

[Bartela]

have attempted shorting the cmos but to no avail. will remove and reinsert the battery to make sure. can't even get a screen though, nevermind going into bios or reformatting for that matter. will try with new mem chip as well. have heard though of via, win2k, and 2 sdram modules, not getting along with some 4in1 via packages, and with asus a7v and memory chips probs. any other thoughts are welcome. will have feedback on repair attempts sometime tomorrow. thanks.

[Bartela]

problem solved. repositoned the pci cards, realigned the mem modules, reattached the drive power cables, and reinserted the cmos lithium bat. of all the trick layed in deciphering that way asus mbs require resequencing the power events after such a failure of the sort; ie:
i/o on
power on
reset 5s
suspend
power 5s
power
reset
reset
my guess is that the reset holds the key and just twice cold rebooting should enter you into the award v6 bios screen with an indication of the error; in my case, it was software enabled OS drivers juggling the mem interleaving, a feature which by the way is not directly supported in the asus a7v 1008 bios revision!