The gaming gawds struck dead my rig

[Pococurante]

Ugh.  I am dead in the water, playing EvE on a six year old notepad.  Unhappy am I.  Help!

Here are the symptoms: when I boot up I see the BIOS splash screen but there are horizontal slashes of white pixels.  When it gets to the normally black background with white characeters boot screen sequence all I see are extended ascii characters filling every display slot of the screen.  The boot menu is displayed (last hardware profile etc) but I can't read it though the prompts perform normally.  It gets to a point in startup and then the system cycles itself.

At first I figured the mobo was fried since hardsetting the bios didn't help.  So I simply replaced the mobo with a near identical release (DFI LANParty UT SLI-DR Exp - old one was the same but not the Expert) and installed just one of the nVidia 6800s instead of the dual SLI/both cards.  Same symptoms.

My next step is to simply switch the video card to the other and see what happens.  But I figured while I'm doing that I'd check with f13's resident modders to see if I'm on the right track.  I figure the CPU (AMD FX64 san diego) and the RAM are ok since the bootup seems fine but for the scrambled characters.  I'm not a hardware jockey. :)

[raydeen]

I would investigate the vid card(s). I worked on a system a while ago that I was fairly sure had a virus in the BIOS. When the system would boot, all the POST data and such would be displayed in alternating upper/lower case characters with some of the characters blinking or changing from upper to lower case. When in Windows, verticle stripes ran across the entire screen. I tried a new video card on the suggestion of my bro-in-law and that fixed all the problems. I think it was an old Riva TNT that had finally given up the ghost.

[Engels]

Bios is written in assembler; I don't think it can be infected with a virus, at least not in the conventional use of the term 'virus'.

[bhodi]

There are indeed bios viruses, there are some AMI/Phoenix ones out there but generally they come in two types:

1. Makes your computer a brick
2. Displays something naughty on startup but otherwise runs fine

It's probably your video card. It sounds stupid, but try re-seating the card. Also, it could theoretically be the slot as well. Unfortunately, there is also the off-chance that the slot or card can damage any hardware you plug it into or plug into it, thus spreading the "problem", so be careful. This is often the case where people get frustrated and can't figure out why the problem keeps following them with brand new hardware (they move a damaged piece over, it damages other components, they replace the damage piece, problem is still there but the hardware is all new)

[geldonyetich]

When it gets to the normally black background with white characeters boot screen sequence all I see are extended ascii characters filling every display slot of the screen.

There must be something going around.  I had the exact same problem just 3 days ago.  It was, like the last time it happened, a video card problem.  Swapped in a new video card (warranties for the win) and now I'm cruising without such nasty corruption on the screen.

No guarentees it's exactly the video card, as my issue I could at least boot up to the system, just with a lot of corruption.  I suspect half the video card's RAM was borked.  Neverwinter Nights 2 was quite unplayable.  It's possible you could still have the same issue if it's trying to swap cache with your video card's ram during bootup, preventing it from booting, but my installation wasn't.

[Pococurante]

That turned out to be the problem.  Ouchie$ - my dual SLI rig is SLI no longer.  But at least now I have an excuse to buy a shell to wrap around the original mobo - "oh honey, it's xmas and daddy's goin' shopping!"

[Signe]

Are you still a man of leisure or did you give in and find a job?  If so... congrats and if so... congrats.  In that order.

Edit:  What good is a spell checkamaboobiething if it just validates your misspellings?

[Joey]

when I boot up I see the BIOS splash screen but there are horizontal slashes of white pixels.

This sounds like a video card issue, but...

When it gets to the normally black background with white characeters boot screen sequence all I see are extended ascii characters filling every display slot of the screen.

...this sounds very much like a RAM problem.

I would try reseating both the video card and RAM modules first, and if that didn't resolve the problem, I'd pop in another video card that's known to be in good shape (just an extra you may have around for testing).  If the problem remains with the replacement video card, then there's a damn good chance that you have a bad stick of RAM.