I take it thats not good?

PC decided to reboot right in the middle of using a forum and the only message i get on boost up is : "Bios checksum error"

It doesnt even load the bios so you cant get into it by pressing del or anything like that.

Take it is donald ducked?

 

try removing the cmos battery for 5 mins to restore the bios to its default settings

put it back in then give it a try

 

The battery's almost certainly flat...

CR2032 from Tesco is only a quid or so, swap it over. You'll probably need to set the date and time afterwards but that's about it.

 

Yeah im going to try the cmos battery, the orginal battery is 6 yrs old now. I bought one this morning if it dont work i got a bios flash disk to try, if that dont work the new cr2032 battery is coming out and going into my door bell (that dont work either at the moment ) and the pc can rot in the loft lol.

Strange it should go while the PC was on and working fine tho.

 

It's probably been duff or on its way out for some time, but whatever caused your computer to restart highlighted it.

 

Well its not he cmos battery as put new one in and still the same. Tested the old one and got 3v there.

Tried the bios flash disc i made and it started to load the bios but then half way throught it stop and comes up with loads of coloured squares and symbols

guess the motherboard or bios chiip has gone

 

If you were half way through flashing the BIOS with a nasty ol' floppy that's been lingering in your drawer, then yes...it's fubarred The BIOS's bootblock should hopefully be intact so you may be able to try flashing it again.

Make a new BIOS flash disk with a known good disk (preformatted ones don't count - format those 10 times before you use them), one with bad sectors is a no-no. Then try running the flash routine again.

You should have a CMOS reset jumper on the board - short it and power up the machine, leave it for about 20 seconds and turn the machine off, and disconnect the CMOS reset jumper. It may be a simple push button on the board instead of a jumper but the same procedure applies.

 

The bios disc was made yesterday while i was at work and used a decent floppy disk from our IT guys. I tried the jumper with the battery in and out and it makes no difference

Im sure something hardware has failed because of the way it suddenly died.

Looking for an replacement socket 478 P4 im/b now but the ones on ebay are $55+ and they werent that expensive new!

Cheers for the advice and help tho