Dead Motherboard??? What do you guys think????

[koolmoecraig]

I had my Rally-X machine going, I left the room and came back to find the screen had gone blank. It was still on but nothing I did made any sounds.

I tried to reboot. The machine turns on and the hard drive spins for a tiny bit but nothing loads.

I tried clearing the CMOS, no difference.

I tried two different video cards with no difference..

I hooked the hard drive up to my computer and I can access it just fine.

I am leaning towards the motherboard being bad. It's one of those ECS pieces of crap so I wouldn't b surprised.

What do you guys think?

[brained]

did you check the memory? sometimes you just need to reseat the memory

[Mr Ironpants]

Sounds like you are right.  Just a few questions I would ask if you were on the other end of the phone.  Yes I used to do this day after day after day after day....

Does the machine go through a the Post test and produce any beeps?  There is a slight possibility that it could be memory but I doubt it.  Generally if it is memory the machine will try to iterate the memory and then give the audio warning beeps (don't remember what they are its been awhile since my A+ test).

Does the drive spins for like a second and then stop?

Are you getting anything at all on the screen when you boot?  It sounds like you are since you cleared the CMOS but I want to make sure (unless you are doing the old crossing the jumpers trick or whatever the manual reset is on this motherboard)

Also, and this falls in the line of is it plugged in so please ignore if appropriate, have you tried the monitor on another box?

[koolmoecraig]

I reseated the memory with no effect.

The machine makes no beeps at all. I get nothing on the screen.

I have an arcade monitor so I haven't hooked it to anything else, but the machine doesn't load at all. Even if the monitor was bad it would play blind which it doesn't.

The hard drive stays spinning but there are no "accessing noises" coming from the drive. The only way I know it is spinning is by holding it in my hand and feeling it.

All that happens when I turn it on is the drive starts spinning the CPU fan turns on and that is it.

I'm off to buy another motherboard to see if that is it. I'll let you know.

Thanks for the input. Keep it coming if you have any other ideas.

One more question? Why does this crap always happen right before you're going to have a friend in from out of town or a party?

[dabone]

Did you try another power supply?



Tis the season!

(I've replaced about 20 power supplies in the last month.)
And around 10 motherboards..



Later,
dabone

[divemaster127]

2nd on the power supply check it before you buy anything
dm

[leapinlew]

Another vote for checking the PSU

[Mamezilla]

I've got a friend's computer that I'm trying to repair and it does exactly the same thing.  All the fans and the hard drive spins, but nothing gets on the screen.  No POST beeps at all.

If something was wrong with the PSU, could the fans and hard drive spin anyway ?  I know there is voltage coming out of it, I've checked one of it's HD connectors with a voltmeter and there is 5 and 12 volts on it.

[divemaster127]

sure you can still have fans etc, your power supply is no longer putting the correct voltage, i would check it away
dm

[leapinlew]

I've got a friend's computer that I'm trying to repair and it does exactly the same thing.  All the fans and the hard drive spins, but nothing gets on the screen.  No POST beeps at all.

If something was wrong with the PSU, could the fans and hard drive spin anyway ?  I know there is voltage coming out of it, I've checked one of it's HD connectors with a voltmeter and there is 5 and 12 volts on it.

I've had cards cause shorts which exhibited this same issue. One thing to always do is bring the system down to a basic level by removing everything except the essentials. Pull the power to everything but the mobo, remove all cards except video, pull all but 1 stick of memory, pull the mouse/keyboard connections and see if it'll post.

[davieboynj]

95% of the time its a power supply.  the question is, what else did the power supply take down with it...

[krick]

Speaking of power supplies, there's a new power supply issue that has started appearing recently.  It obviously isn't what is going on with the original poster's machine but I thought it was relevant in light of the recent posts.

If you have a new high-efficiency power supply, combined with system that doesn't draw much power (usually mATX with integrated video, and often using an AMD CPU), when you turn on the sytem, the fans spin but it won't POST.  More info...   

http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=30289

I'm helping a friend build a sytem that has this problem.  I'm making a load resistor for the 12V line that pugs into a spare drive power connector that should hopefully fix the problem.