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

[Wayne E. Van Loon Sr.]

Winterbeast wrote:
> David Fleck 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.
>>
>> So I'm at a loss for what to do next (aside from "buy a new computer").
>>
>> I suppose it's possible that my old mobo is bad, AND the new one is also - 
>> or that the CPU has died, or that the old mobo is bad, and I damaged the 
>> CPU in moving it from one machine to the other.  
>>
>> How can I test these various possibilities? Are there other possibilities 
>> that I am overlooking?
>>
>> (A further note - the HD is fine; I moved the hard drive to the spare PC, 
>> put the power supply back in, and it booted up fine, which is how I'm 
>> typing this e-mail. Unfortunately, the spare machine doesn't support my 
>> graphics card.)
>>
>> All comments welcome, thanks in advance-
>>
>> --
>> David Fleck
>> david.fleck at mchsi.com
>>
>>
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>>  
>>
>>     
> So far, it sounds like a no video condition. my idea would be to take 
> out everything, most of which you've done,  and see if it will respond 
> with no daughtercards, no drives, no nothing except the video card,  
> memory, cpu. see if it will come up to bios. you might check the 
> monitors. will the monitor work on other systems? might be an issue.
>   
Good thinking on the video.
When trying to boot the suspect mother board and system, does the disk 
drive LED flash? Can you telnet or ssh into the box? Can you ping it 
from another machine?
Wayne

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