Hot wire a mobo? --UPDATE! Need advise

SciFiMan

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Weird problem last night with a dying c: drive. So I had a spare SATA drive and I put it in the case. Just in the slot, added power and the SATA connection to the mobo (PRI_SATA port). Now the PC shows no signs of powering on. Power supply seems okay although I will test it tonight, but it had been working 15 minutes before just fine.

So I'm thinking the stars aligned just right and at this particular moment the case power switch failed. I reseated that wire on the mainboard but no luck. Can I hot wire it by putting a jumper on the PWR and GND pins ? Would that force power to be always on? Or would it hurt the board? Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
 
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case switches dont really go bad, the odds of that over either ur PS dieing or ur MB are like 1/1000000. I would try a diff powersuppy first and if not then a new mb =( also you can just put anything that conducts electricity (end of ur screwdriver) up against the two power jumpers and it should start right up if it is in fact your case button.
 

cdonato

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I'm guessing that you are overdrawing the PSU or its dying. I'd try it with a new one. Like the previous posted said the switch going bad is unlikely unless you jam the crap out of it & have busted the switch portion. As for jumper-ing out the mobo that sounds like an amazingly bad idea. I'd bet of it blowing out in your face if you do it.
 

SciFiMan

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Well, the year old power supply tests out fine and it does light up a green LED on the Asus board as well as two for the RJ45 port.

I guess there isn't a way to know if the mobo is bad other than try a new one. That's why I'd love to find a safe work around for the power button if there is one, just to see.

Any more votes as to whether the PWR-GND pins can be safely used to remove the switch from equation?
 

kitchenshark

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Yes.

Just use a paperclip or something metal/conductive and short the powerswitch pins momentarily. It won't hurt your MB. Heh, well I should say that the chance of it hurting your MB is mathmatically small...there always IS that just one incredibly small longshot of anything going wrong.

I've done this before, I haven't experienced any bad effects.
 

qwertycopter

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Can I hot wire it by putting a jumper on the PWR and GND pins ? Would that force power to be always on?
No, you do not want to try this. Nowadays cases use soft switches.. meaning you press it in and it briefly connects the power and ground to send a "power on" signal. To turn off the PC you hold the power button in for 5-10 seconds which sends the "power off" signal. But when you release the button for either case, the two pins are no longer connected. All the power button does is allow signals to pass through briefly.

If you left the pins connected, I am guessing it would continually send power on signal, then power off, and the PC would stay of until you disconnected the pins and reconnected them to resend the power on signal. That's just a guess, it might instead cycle power on power off over and over.
 

qwertycopter

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Case buttons actually do break from time-to-time. They can come damaged/weakened/defective. And of course with mechanical parts and modular connectors, a lot can go wrong.

Before you spend more $$...

Short the two pins for a moment with the tip of a flathead screw driver. If the PC powers on, then the case switch has a break in it somewhere (in which case a new motherboard won't help you).

You could also rebuild the PC outside of the case to eliminate the possibilty that the motherboard is somehow being shorted by the motherboard tray. Just a thought (examples: a screw wedged between the tray and motherboard; missing standoff).
 

pshrk

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Yes, in fact once i couldn't find a paper clip so i used a quarter and it worked just fine. Maybe unplugging your system and leaving the battery out for a few hours or overnight might help. I do agree with one of the previous posts, you may want to rebuild the system outside of the case to make sure it's not a short.

As a side note i recently bought a socket 754 3200+ and a nice biostar mobo off of newegg for $89 as a combo deal.
 

Hyggelik

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Had a similar problem, that I would turn the PC on, it would spin the fans for a second and then power down.
Of course my first thought was that it is the board or the power supply.
But then (before buying more stuff) I took the board out of the case and hooked it up again. It ran up just fine!
I put some plastic washers for insulation between the poles in the case and the board as well as between the board screws and the board (you need to find longer board screws for that). To hold the washers under the board in place, I used a little bit of superglue before putting the board back inside.
When powering up, it worked just fine, so my guess is that I had a short somewhere, which thankfully did not cause any other damage (I had moved the computer around, so that may have caused the board to move just a tiny bit).
 

SciFiMan

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Thanks to everyone! There was something wrong with my trusty old Asus board, apparently also affecting the IDE.

Now, I have this cheap (only one available) mobo from PC Chips for my old Athlon 2500+. Seems to work fine, and get this. I put it all back together, and other than an initial Disk Check, it booted!

Now I quickly copied off critical data, and my question is do y'all think the drives were hurt any? I still need to load the chipset drivers for this new board, and remove the old nForce stuff from the old board. The first Disk Check finished stage 1 (files) quickly, but then hung on stage 2 (indexing) for about 15 minutes. I then power cycled and skipped disk check the second time just so I could save my data while I had a chance. If disk check continues to hang should I backup up and reformat, etc.? Or try some disk utilities? Just wondering, and thanks again.
 
As long as you have your files, a reformat/disk scan will be the best way to check the disk. A reinstall of windows in a necessity when changing a board.

At least it looks like the hard part is over.

was it a pc chips M830 board?
 

SciFiMan

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Nuke, no it is the M848A board. The basics but good enough for a kid and now I can focus on building a modern DX10 rig for me. (Just waiting for first offerings from ATI to compare GPU's.) I'll see how it shapes up tonight but I probably will format and lay XP down again to clean up the old crap that has accumulated.

You guys (and Toms) are the best!