no POST.. no anything..

[patrick049]

Hi all,
My fiancee's machine decided this weekend to not power up anymore, but I've been out of the repair business for some time. The machine does not reach POST, and the fans won't even spin or twitch.

Process so far:
- Disconnect all drives - no change
- Remove all cards - no change
- Remove RAM - no change
- Remove CPU - no change
- Replace power supply with known-good - no change

Is there really anything else to do before ordering a new motherboard? It used to be that a motherboard would give some POST beeps with nothing at all installed (would beep for no CPU or no RAM). I'll try the note in the sticky post to completely clear out the CMOS but at this point I'm not expecting anything to come out of this thing.

[mechbas]

which fans?
what U stated that used to be still is.
clearing the CMOS at this point seems to be a moot issue.
off the cuff I'd guess that she got hit by a power surge/spike while the machine was powered up, if that's the case then nearly everything else then running is subject to be toast.

[mattb0611]

This happened to my friend's computer recently. Only thing that fixed it was a new mobo. If the fans aren't spinning up, it's not even beginning the post process.

[dcc]

With the known good PSU installed and its fan doesn't spin up it looks like the motherboard. The PSU requires the motherboard to make contact between the green power on wire and ground in order to turn on the PSU.

Another thought here, try jumping out the on/off header and see if that works, it could just be a bad momentary switch.

[patrick049]

mechbas: No fans at all. Not the PS fan or the CPU fan or even the case fan. Nothing moves or even twitches.

mattb0611: Yeah, that's what I was fearing.

dcc: I tested the PSU but not the momentary. Thanks! I'll try that one tomorrow.

In any case, it turns out that a comparable mobo only costs about $35 and I'll start from there.

Thanks everyone for your help! vbmenu_register("postmenu_346511", true);

[Mustapha01]

Hi Patrick,

Sounds like you've covered all the bases and the motherboard indeed seems to have passed on. (Sometimes even the dead-boards can and do return to the realm of the living, unexpectedly but, please do read on...)

This might be a good time to maybe even purchase a mobo-combo (chip+board) that is an improvement over the recently deceased board.

You didn't mention the board make/type/model or the chip make & model, but going on a hunch, am thinking it may be a few years or so old?

If so, for only a bit more, you can get a much better board and newer/faster chip and your fiancee would then be eternally grateful to you! :) (until the next, inevitable digital disaster comes along.)

As for the dead returning, I have a collection of dead boards, accumulated over few years and about once a year, I'll tinker with them, just for the fun of it. I've been able to summon from the dead, at least three/four boards, in this way. Again, previously I had tried seemingly everything to spot signs of life (different chip, cpu, psu, ram, misc cards, etc., approach, similar to what you did) in these boards and they were just dead.

In one case, the board functioned perfectly three years after being pronounced dead, for about a week, then dead again... Who knows? Obviously this particular board is neither fully dead nor fully alive - an undead board?

While no one can seriously entertain the thought of super-natural forces acting upon a motherboard, either faulty/poor design or manufacturing flaws can cause host of problems down the road.

In some cases, much like a program with flaws, a somewhat faulty motherboard will exhibit problematic behavior only after an addition of a card, etc.

Basically, these motherboards are quiet literally like little cities, in their own rights and some are fairly efficient and they perform well and others are poorly thought-out and they perform dismally.

The moral of the story? Buy the best motherboard that you can afford (even if you have to temporarily settle for lesser chip than you wanted) and go from there.

Mustapha

[patrick049]

I was tinkering with this machine a bit to try to see what the extent of the damage was and took dcc's advice. I installed the known-good PSU in and then saw that I had knocked the momentary switch connection loose while disconnecting drives. Plugged that back in and it came up fine. Thanks everyone for the advice, but it appears it was mostly negligence on my part.

So I guess I'm off to the store for a new PSU (the existing one still will not do anything).

Mustapha01:
We're both students, so cash is always tight, and both our machines are due for some fixing up. Hopefully I'll be able to buy a couple of mb/cpu combos for us this summer.

On your story about the dead returning: My last hard drive didn't completely fail, but somehow gained a mind of its own. If I were to plug it in right now there's no telling if it'll run for five minutes or five days before needing to "rest" again. Very odd.

[mattb0611]

Thanks everyone for the advice, but it appears it was mostly negligence on my part.

It's always so easy to assume the worst. Glad you got it fixed!