[PLUG] Hardware puzzle of the day - desktop won't boot

[linux-yug]

On Wed, 2008-12-31 at 10:50 -0600, David Fleck wrote:
> Waaaay back in September, I sent mail describing a serious hardware 
> failure (desktop machine totally non-responsive) and some efforts I made 
> toward trying to fix it.  I also received cogent and generous advice from 
> the mailing list, and in retrospect, the nugget of the solution was in 
> there as well, but unfortunately it was overlooked until just recently. 
> Since I described the problem here, for completeness I figure I should 
> describe the cause and solution also.
> 
> To reiterate the problem:
> > On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 6:27 AM, David Fleck <david.fleck at mchsi.com> wrote:
> >> Seeking advice/opinions on the following situation:
> >>
> >> 6-year old homebuilt PC, ASUS motherboard, Athlon CPU, OpenSuSE 10.1 (not
> >> that I think that part is relevant.)
> >> About a week ago, I came downstairs and discovered the machine was off.
> >> It was on when I left it the previous evening.
> >> I pushded the button, and the fans whirred up. No other activity - no
> >> POST, no HDD noise or lights.
> >> I thought that maybe the power supply was bad, so I removed it and put it
> >> into a spare machine (that didn't have a power supply). That machine
> >> booted normally.
> >> I put the power supply back into the sick machine, and unplugged all the
> >> drives.  Same result - fans whir, no POST or HDD activity.
> >> I removed the memory.  Same result - fans whir, no POST or HDD activity.
> >> So now I am thinking it's the motherboard, and I order one of the only two
> >> mobo's Newegg offers that still supports 462(A) socket processors, the PC
> >> Chips M848A.  Wait for it to arrive....
> >> It arrived yesterday. So I carefully disassembled my sick PC, put in the
> >> new mobo, reassembled it, turned it on... and no change. Fans spin, no
> >> POST, no HDD activity.
> >> Take out the memory, disconnect the drives, restart - same behavior.
> >> Swap in a pouer supply from my wife's machine - same behavior.
> >> Remove the CPU - same behavior.
> 
> A number of suggestions came in, but unfortunately, they didn't spur me in 
> the right direction (even though Rich Shepard hit upon the culprit in his 
> response).  Instead, I wandered further off track:
> 
> >On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, David Fleck wrote:
> >> The monitor works fine with other systems.  I tried pulling out all the 
> >> daughtercards and rebooting, no change in behavior (fans whir, no 
> >> lights or other activity, no video, no apparent checking for drives or
> >> peripherals)
> >> At this point, the only common factor I can come up with is the CPU, so
> >> I'm going to take a chance on a $25.00 recycled Athlon chip and see if
> >> that brings the system back to life.
> 
> Well, the 'new' chip didn't bring the system back to life either.  Not 
> wanting to spend any more time or money on the whole project, I just 
> switched over to a crappy backup machine for a while, and more recently 
> was able to snag a bunch of semi-functional 3 - 4 year old machines that 
> were being junked at work, and assemble them into one pretty good machine, 
> better than the desktop that up and died on me.  I shelved the remains of 
> the old desktop.
> 
> Just today, as I was doing some maintenance on my daughter's machine, I 
> got it into my head to put one of her memory DIMMs into my stricken box. 
> It booted up immediately.
> 
> Damn.
> 
> Rich Shepard had suggested new RAM, but I ignored that because I was 
> convinced that the motherboard ought to respond, in some way - a beep, 
> something - even without RAM.  It turns out that's not the case.  I was 
> suspicious of the existing RAM, but foolishly assumed that the BIOS would 
> respond differently when given bad RAM vs. no RAM.  Live and learn.
> 
> --




My experience is without RAM... Unit beeps forever.......

Linux-yug

> David Fleck
> david.fleck at mchsi.com
> 
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