Comp died, help required please

[BarryS]

I bow to the collective knowledge of the MURC, and beg permission to ask for assistance in troubleshooting my dead machine.

The machine has just died. No warning, nothing. I was just reading my mail (with a coupla apps open, but nothing taxing) when the screen went black. Switched screen off and on just in case - nothing.

Here's the spec

Abit BE6-II (raid, but not used)
1 GHz PIII (Slot 1)
256MB Cas 2 Crucial
IBM 30 GB Deskstar on IDE 3
Radeon 32 DDR (it's my son's machine, ok?)
SB Live value (slot 4)
3com 3c509 NIC in ISA slot

There doesn't appear to be a LED lit up on the MB, is there one?

The on/off switch will switch the machine on, but not off.

PSU is a Seventeam one (only 250W but I don't think I'm stressing it) and needs a few minutes to reset. After getting nowhere after waiting what seemed an eternity, I swapped out the power supply and moved it to a new monitor. I switched on and.... nothing. Oh, the fan on the CPU and the vid card spin up but there are no beeps, and nothing on the screen, not even the bios bits and pieces, and the hdd doesn't spin up (but then it may not be supposed to until the bios has got going).

Just swapped out the CPU and it made no difference.

Where do I go next?

TIA

Barry

[Dr Mordrid]

Lots of things could be wrong. Start by reseating the memory and all the cards.

After checking the above it's time to dig in. With this kind of failure I usually suspect the BIOS taking a hike. If this is the case the AGP slot will go dead and the display card with it.

To test this theory you can put in an old PCI plain-Jane display adapter (I use a 2 meg Micronix I've had for ages) that has a text mode.

Most ABIT boards I have used (including the wifes BH6) will display a text screen noting the dead BIOS and prompting for a boot floppy containing a new BIOS image and its installation utility. Re-flashing the BIOS will usually bring the board back to life.

A new MB battery might also be in order if this is the case.

Dr. Mordrid

[Greebe]

of course there is the perverbial "make sure everything is in the slot fully"... but I'd be suspect of the MB.

btw if the PS is problematic it can take out many other componets

[BarryS]

Thanks guys,

all cards out then in, replaced Radeon with a pci Millenium card, but no go with that either. Not even a dead bios message.

[Rimfaxe]

i'd say, try another PSU...

it can make strange errors... unplug all... exept memory and a pci video card. it should make some beeps, or else BIOS is dead...

sorry

[Greebe]

i'd say, try another PSU...

he did

[Liquid Snake]

You know, I actually had a similar experience after coming home from a vacation back in August of last year. PC wouldn't start, and the few times it did, it died at the BIOS screen. It wouldn't turn off w/o pulling the plug. After some days of reading and looking around, I found that the capacitors on the mobo by the CPU slot had blown - I have a BE6-II as well, but an older revision (no RAID). Replaced them and everything was fine afterwards. And strangely, no data loss either. Check the caps by the Slot1 and see if any of them have blown.

[BarryS]

Thanks LS,

I've just had a look and all the caps seem ok. Well, when I say 'seem ok', there are none that look like the blown caps I've seen in pictures of other Abit boards, ie oozing black stuff.

I've just been to the site where I bought the board from, and wouldn't you know it, I bought the damned thing on 8th Jan last year. Anyways, they had an option to return items from the order, so I've started the process. Let's see what happens when one of their reps rings tomorrow.

In the meantime, can anyone recommend a reasonably good still-available Slot 1 board? Or am I best forgetting about slot 1 now (would be a shame, that cpu wasn't cheap)?

[Wombat]

The HDs should be spinning up. Even when I had a dead CPU in my MB, the CPU fan would turn on for a split second, and the HDs would make noises.

IDE drives can mess a system up if something is wrong on the IDE bus. Disconnect the IDE cables from the MB and eliminate them as a source of complication.

Does your NIC have lights on it? Do they come on at all? NICs are fairly intelligent by themselves, and as long as they have a cable connected to them, and power, you should see them trying to do something.

[BarryS]

An Update

Thanks for all your help so far guys, here's an update.

Having discovered that I bought the MB just over a year ago I wasn't sure that the vendor would take it back. They gave me a RMA number, a link to click so that I could arrange for it to be picked up (free!) and offered me a full refund. Good on ya Dabs.com.

There aren't that many places still selling slot1 boards, and I found only one, a SuperMicro P6SBA. I ordered it yesterday and it arrived this morning. Only downside is that it's only ata33.

The hard drive works fine in another machine, at least to get the data off and back up, and all partitions are readable, I've not tried it as a boot disk in the other machine though.

I then decided to try the old board one more time (as you do when you've already got the replacement!) and the blessed thing fired up! It got as far as the 'press F8 for w2k options' message then died. Every time.

So I decided to try to reload W2K; it manages to copy the startup files and then when it says 'Starting Windows 2000' and tries to load W2K itself it dies again.

Does this still sound like a MB failure.

Should I open the new MB and put it in or is there something else I should try first?

TIA

Barry

PS Wombat, I'll try the NIC bit in the morning, but as I can't load W98 or W2K will it still show me anything?

[KeiFront]

Try testing your Ram probably that's the culprit.

[BarryS]

KeiFront,

Just done that, blew out at the same point. Thanks for the tip though.