ASUS P4P800 stalls in 'Testing NVram'

[Tuckerboy]

Hi,
I have a 2 year old ASUS P4P800 motherboard machine. that just started to have a problem. It stalls in the very beginning of the POST(no beeps). the screen says 'American Megatrends'
'Testing NVram.....' that's it.
Does anyone know if this failure is a motherboard problem or can the CPU be involved.
Cheers
Tuckerboy

[belikemike]

Unplug all your disc drives. If you know someone who has a compatable stick of ram and will let you use it for a half hour or so, replace yours and see if you can get past that point. If you can't at least you have narrowed it down to the board or processor. You can take out your processor and have it tested.

[BeastOverlordH6]

Seeing as I got a P5P800 SE ASUS board, I also have the same "AMIBIOS." I'm guessing the board is having a lot of difficulty reading your ram (as the process should be fairly quick, resulting in "[RAM size] OK." One problem may involve corrupt memory.

This isn't a power issue, as power wouldn't affect one specific point of bootup as specified.

I'm questioning processor issue additionally, as a processor failure doesn't even boot the system most of the time.

Motherboard/RAM/Processor are possible culprits.

[JemB]

if it wont even post it would point a corrupted bios. this may be fixable by the dreaded flashing of the bios or if you can find an identical bios chip (this should only be done by an experienced user). less likely is a damaged boot sector first see if you can get it to start up using an xp boot diskette. to make one find a pc with xp, set it to show all hidden/system files then go to root of c and copy NTLDR + NTDETECT.COM + BOOT.INI (also NTBOOTDD.SYS if you have a SCSI drive) put it in the floppy drive and fire it up. if this works boot from your install disk and overwrite to restore your system. sounds more like the first one tho