Tech Spotlight

I recently came across this problem with the monitor not turning on while booting with an Abit motherboard.  What is great about most Abit motherboards is that they have a two digit display on the motherboard itself that gives you some idea what state the motherboard is in while booting.

The post code it was hanging on was 9.0 which according to Abit is the “Complete uGuru initial process, AWARD BIOS take over booting job” which in effect means nothing.  Searching around the web I came across tons of people having this problem and most had no answer or stated that the motherboard was gone or the BIOS chip had fried.  Even some Abit technicians had responded on forums stating that the 9.0 post code means the motherboard is useless.

Delving into the problem further, I removed my video card and the system would boot normally, and the only way to access the PC was to Remote Desktop, which I did and everything was working fine.  So I immediately threw in a spare card and had the same problem with no video and the system hanging.

So I started from scratch, shut down the PC, disabled all power and inspected inside the PCI Express slot, and to my amazement it was filled with crud, dirt and dust.  I performed a thorough cleaning of the PCI-E contact points and blew out the rest of the dust inside the case.  Now, I popped my original video card back in and voila!  The gold sensors on the video card slot apparently were not making good contact with the nVidia card itself resulting in the post code error of 9.0.

Just to let all users aware that come across this problem, the Abit post code 9.0 does not definitely mean that the motherboard is trash.  It is quite possible that this post code could in fact mean other things, but in my case it was a simple cleaning of the PCI slots.  Hopefully if you encounter this error on your motherboard, that it will indeed be something simple like this and not something more damaging like a fried chip.