PC problem.

[Chris Green]

But it's the cheap, no-name 'generic' ones that often work better in my experience rather than needing custom drivers.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Think they are still used for comms on CAD machines. I use it with MegaSquirt. You can get USB to serial adaptors, but they don't seem as robust as full serial.

[Andrew]

But you wont be able to buy those for anywhere near the rock-bottom price that PCI serial cards were on sale for.

Startech do sell a conversion riser card that plugs into a PCIe slot, and allows a PCI card to piggy back onto it for anyone who is desparate to keep using an old specialist PCI card in use.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Not in this case. The computer is on the opposite side of the room to my workbench. A long serial lead works just fine. A USB to serial convertor with a long lead - either serial or USB - doesn't.

[Andrew]

Have you tried removing both those cards, and shorting the 'reset cmos' pins, then trying to boot it again with minimal hardware ?.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

After saving the BIOS settings, no beep at all. Out of interest I swapped the BIOS chip from a similar but not identical broken MB I'd kept. Same thing. Comes to the BIOS page, but then dies totally when saved.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Quite. It's used for MS in this workshop. A USB converter works OK between laptop and MS in the car, but doesn't like the cable runs here.

[Andrew]

Don't many AV amps have a serial port that allows it to be hidden from view and connected to some other controlling system ?.

[Lee]

Just a quick sanity check - are you testing this with a hard drive or other boot media connected? I've had hard drives with corrupt boot sectors cause this symptom in the past...

[Dave Plowman (News)]

It's totally stripped down. Only the main SSD and the video card (for DVI) in place. And I've tried the video card in another machine - it's OK.

I'll try and find out how to reset the CMOS. No idea where the manual is - I might have to Google.

[Bob Eager]

Be warned also that there are two common, incompatible pinouts for those headers. So buying a cable with a DE-9 on a plate on the other end may or may not work.

I always make my own as required.

[alan_m]

The beeps will be as you switch on, possibly when you are not pressing a function key to get into the bios.

[invalid]

they are nearly all the prolific chip set and work with every serial device I have including the telescope which is supposed to be fussy.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

With absolutely nothing connected, saving the BIOS page results in not being able to even get to that again. Except by removing/replacing the battery. Then the whole cycle repeats.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Correct. No beeps at all at power up. When you save the BIOS, IIRC, the machine would normally re-boot. So beep when it does.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Lots of reports on the MegaSquirt forum of some not working with that. Once reason I liked having the serial port. Gets rid of a variable.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Found how to by Googling, but it implied all this does is cancel the time and date settings. Which removing the battery does anyway. But tried it.

Same result.

Rather than going to the BIOS page, I just let it run, and it did boot normally. Shut it down properly, then switched on again. Nothing - no beep.

I've bought a used identical MB off Ebay for not a lot, so hope that will give me a few more years.

Just for info the current one is an Asus AN8-SLI Delux. Never got round to using the RAID facility on it.

I'd be happy to buy a brand new one if I could be sure all my cards etc would work with it. But not sure what to go for.

[Lee]

I think at this point the only useful advice is if you know someone who has a POST test card - not worth buying one of course. At least then you'd know if it was even trying to POST and where it was stopping.

[Lee]

Fair enough.

Sort of smells like a motherboard power issue, as others have alluded to. Don't know how far you'd get trouble shooting that though.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I did once have a laptop repaired. They removed the offending chip, cleaned and re-soldered. A known problem on that laptop. But such things beyond my paygrade even if I knew what the fault was. ;-)