just recently purchased an nvidia xfx geforce 210 graphics card...installed it and my computer will go past the motherboard logon screen i can enter bios but it will get to a point where it says checking nvram...status ok! and then freeze. sometimes it will freeze before it says status ok it will freeze at checking nvram then nothing else happens. my computer is an alhena gl6 motherboard made by hp. i have 2 gigs of ram. intel celeron processor 3.2 ghz. at first i thought it was my power supply because i only had a 300watt supply but now i have a 450 watt supply in and still no luck. the minimum required for the card is a 350 watt supply so i should have plenty with a 450. the computer meets all requirements for this card it just wont work!! i just put this computer together and i had a really old crappy 16mb video card i was using in it before i bought a good one to make sure everything functioned properly..pc works great with the old crappy nvidia 16mb card but the new card wont boot windows...any ideas?
possibly drivers need updated, was the card definately connected properly and what make is your new PSU?
Off-topic sorry, but can someone explain what the NVRAM check is and why it's there? It slows my boot times down by 20 secs +
It won't be drivers your error occurs before drivers enter the equation. Your board is an ECS RC410-M with a silly name aka Asterope aka Alhena. I'd flash to the latest HP BIOS first and make sure that the card is getting enough power, it doesn't use supplementary connectors so you should be OK. If you're using the HP BIOS reset the BIOS before attempting to boot with a new card, and update if you're feeling brave and an HP BIOS update is available. If you're feeling extra brave flashing with the latest ECS BIOS is the best option, but this may stop your restore CD working. Other causes for this hang, less likely than needing a BIOS reset are: Loose drive cable, BIOS battery needs replacing, IRQ conflict. Good luck.
Check to see if there is a BIOS updates for the board, but it may be too old. It could be a PCIe gen1/gen2 issue, the card could be asking for more PCI resources than the system can provide, there may be PCI resource conflict, or any of a number of other problems. Sometimes, nVidia cards do some unexpected things and BIOS chokes. the fist thing I would try is throwing more RAM at the problem. Teh card may be asking for so much from BIOS that it runs out of memory to assign and the system hangs. If the mainboard has on board video, make sure it is disabled (if you can). If it says something about giving priority to PCIe or PEG, that usually does not mean that onboard video is disabled. Also try disabling your other onboard devices. I suggest starting with USB (if you have PS/2 ports), then the NIC, then the on board audio, then the hard drive controller. Try them one at a time before you try a combination of them. If you find one of them causes a conflict, then you need to see if you can tweak the settings for the device to try and make the issue go away. That is not something I could explain as it is dependent on what options are in the BIOS, and what the ODM called them. The NV in NVRAM stands for non volatile meaning it retains its contents when you turn off your computer or unplug it. I have no idea about your particular BIOS so I can only say that in the BIOS I have seen, there is actually a lot of device initialization and checking is done besides just the NVRAM check. I don't know why it is done this way in the BIOS I am looking at, but I suspect it has to do with putting something on the screen so the user knows the computer is doing something. If you are really curious, it is customary for BIOS to use the I/O port at address 80h to write single byte codes to. These codes can be read with a common PCI 'diagnostics' card to give you some idea of what the BIOS is doing provided you have a list of the POST coded for that BIOS.
