[sclug] OT: Mmmm, too hot...

[Alex Butcher]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2005, James Beckett wrote:

> The box in question has 'doze installed, but, um, that's not important right 
> now.
> Home built, Asus A7N8X mobo, Athlon XP 3200+, Gainward GF4 Ti4600..
>
> Rebooted itself a few times while I was watching last Fri night, and now
> is being a steadfast dead duck. No POST beeps, no nothing. Any thoughts on
> things to try before I have a go at wrestling with Dabs to take the mobo
> back under (manufacturer's) warranty?

Disconnect the PSU, disconnect everything connected to it (VGA, keyboard,
USB devices etc.), then disconnect all internal peripherals bar the CPU.
Re-attach the PSU, and give it a whirl. Hopefully, you'll get beeps
indicating missing RAM and/or VGA card. Start adding components back,
starting with internal peripherals.

Ridiculous though it sounds, this fixed a machine I had problems with after
a run of power glitches. I suspect that some state machine somewhere was
left in a wedged state such that it couldn't move to the 'on' state because
it was already on, and couldn't move to the 'off' state either, because it
was already off. USB devices are especially tricksy; I've recently read a
technote on the Apple site indicating that many USB devices (e.g. powered
hubs) don't conform to the USB spec, and feed power back in through the USB
port. On my machine, this manifested as the warning LEDs indicating power
was still applied to the RAM and AGP card, even though the ATX PSU was
disconnected from the motherboard!

> On plugging in I get the ATX light on the mobo; power-on winds up the fans, 
> the
> HDs do their initial seek and then no further progress.
>
> I've tried -
> Leaving unplugged overnight to cool down / forget itself
> BIOS/RTC reset by jumper/battery fiddling
> Booting without memory / disks / gfx card, to try and provoke POST beeps
> Different CPU (but not sure if a 1.4GHz runs in this mobo anyway)
> PSU bypass from another PC.
>
> That seems to eliminate every other piece of hardware in the machine...

Of course, it's possible that something got zapped during all that swapping
around.

> -jmb

HTH,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>