Dell Inspiron 620 Fried Motherboard ?

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bigtalon

bigtalon

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Dec 29, 2012
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Ok, so my mother-in-law purchased a pre-fab dell computer "Which I hate pre-built pieces of junk.." But she had a storm recently, and the computer has quit working, she told me it was just unable to get on the internet, Well when I get it home and hook it up, you can clearly smell an odor of something burnt from the Power Supply, the computer will boot up, until it gets to the Starting Windows part, With the 3 balls on windows 7 ? They never appear, it just says Starting windows, nothing goes further... I can not find out much info about this Dell Prefab Motherboard though, LED1 is the only LED on, Not sure what that indicates on this board without some kind of documentation, but Dell don't like to share so you have to buy a whole new PC... "Why I hate dell haha...." Also another note, the LED on the Ethernet does not come on, I am having a feeling it is the Motherboard that is fried, or power supply. But why is it loading up so far without crashing, and it just stalls at that point, never loading windows, makes me think the hard drive is bad, Could it be a combination of all 3, Also forgot to mention LED1 is on on the board, only LED on, but I can't find a manual diagram for the 620 motherboard. What do you guys suggest I do next ?
 
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Karsten75

Karsten75

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Oct 15, 2009
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After lightning, things are so unpredictable. I had a strike a few weeks back - toasted the home security system, the garage door opener, our phones, my Internet router, the TV set-top box and my Roku. The only units that failed hard were the garage door opener and the alarm. ALl the others displayed weird and puzzling symptoms. Even Verizon claimed that their ONT was working, but when the tech came out here he was puzzled by the start-up sequence and it wouldn't work.

TL;DR new PC time.
 
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bigtalon

bigtalon

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Dec 29, 2012
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I know lightning is unpredictable, was looking for more technical help
 
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Karsten75

Karsten75

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I can see you don't get it. There's a wide selection of components, any or all of which could have failed. In unpredictable ways. A new Dell can be bought for about $300. You have none of the tools to test components and motherboards and CPUs can't be tested, except to replace them in a "known good" configuration and then you run the risk of damaging some other components.

At best you can try and buy an external enclosure for the hard drive and try and salvage whatever she may have on there that is salvageable. That'll set you back $14 or so and you can still be the hero. $25 or so should buy you a PSU tester that will tell you if the PSU still delivers the correct voltages. A POST diagnostic PCI card costs about $34. That will tell you if there is an issue during POST. THat then leaves the CPU and the memory.

Good luck.
 
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T

tavo99xx

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Oct 13, 2014
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I had exactly the same situation in exactly this model of computer with exactly the same symtoms. But in my case, I wasn't even able to turn the computer on: blinking orange led in mother board/blinking green led in power supply/blinking amber led in power button. I fix this first issue with the "jumping" the green with a black cable in the 24-pin main power connector (ATX) trick. Of course you have to do this with the power cord unplugged. Also, I recommend to keep power button pressed for half a minute and connecting the power cord when the power button is still pressed.

Then I retired the cable that did the trick and I turned computer on with EXACTLY the same issue you described: booting stuck in "starting windows" with the windows logo frozen. Because the hard drive led in front panel was on, I left the computer running in this screen for 4-5 hours in case Windows was checking de disk, but I noticed the disk was cold, so I decided to force reboot.

Strange was that an installation windows-7 DVD got stuck in EXACTLY the same point, and when I tried to boot with a Linux DVD, it got stuck too.

After some testing, I realised that the integrated Ethernet adapter was fried, and once I disabled this piece of hardware in BIOS, everything went ok. Nevertheless, not even Dell diagnostic was able to find the adapter, so I concluded it was definitly dead.

I have not tried a PCI-E adapter to replace the failed one, but I suspect (maybe) the pci-e ports got fried too :( Anyway, an USB adapter should be fine.

I hope this helps future readings.

 
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20 f33t down

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Dec 25, 2014
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Bless you tavo99x. I love you. I disabled the LAN in BIOS and tada!! Great Job Man. Happy New Year. Great Job. Inspiron 620. Heads up, built-in diagnostics did not report a motherboard error/fault during dell system analysis originally. Everybody applaud for this guy!!!

This does 'help future readings.' I love problem solvers!!!

 
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