This machine ran beautifully for over a year. For several months now, this homebuilt machine would occasionally fail to boot or restart, but it's gotten to where it will successfully POST and boot maybe one out of 20 times. As of tonight, it will not boot no matter how many times I try. There's power - but no beep, no BIOS screen, just PSU fan, CPU Fan and case fan spinning. Pulled the board, and saw no sign of shorting.
Here's the specs:
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Dual-Core - 2.2GHz
Motherboard: Asus M2NBP-VM
2gb RAM (two sticks, 1 Patriot and 1 Crucial, tried together and individually)
320 gb SATA Hard Drive
160 gb IDE Hard Drive
LG DVD-RW IDE optical drive
Primo P4 ATX Mid Tower Case with 500w Power Supply
Added a GeForce 7600 PCI x16 for OS X
Added a Realtek 8139 PCI ethernet card for OS X
I am NOT doing any overclocking.
Thing's I've tried:
-- CMOS Battery (CR2032) was dead, at least my tester showed it just in the red, right below the green, so I thought, "AHA!" and went to get a new battery today. Tested it before installing, it showed a full charge. Did the jumper thing on the motherboard that clears the CMOS cache. Put in new battery - no difference. Dammit!
-- Backside of motherboard shorted against the case? I pulled the motherboard, which was carefully stood-off when I installed it, completely out of the case, laid it on a dry towel, and connected only the 2 power connectors to the board, monitor to the on-board video connector, and one stick of RAM (tried both sticks, one at a time). Attempted to power up to see if I'd get the POST beep - it should POST and show me the BIOS screen even if no drives are connected, right? But nothing. Just the PSU, CPU and case fans come on. No beep, no BIOS screen.
-- Power Supply? Pulled the power supply motherboard connector. Using a paper clip, I jumped the green and black pins to power up the PSU while the connector was unhooked. The PSU fan runs fine. With a digital multimeter, I tested all pins on the 24-pin ATX power connector, plus the 4-pin CPU power connector. All the voltages are correct. the 3.3v, 5.0v, and 12.0v values are all spot-on. I realize that is with no load, but it is something.
-- When the machine was running in XP, the ASUS motherboard monitoring app showed all voltages and temperatures to be normal. I rarely saw the CPU go above 45 Celsius.
-- Seating of RAM, Video Card, Ethernet? Pulled everything and re-seated it. Tried both RAM sticks, one at a time.
-- IDE Issue? Tried every possible permuation of Master/Slave, Primary/Secondary on the IDE chain with my IDE devices, plus every IDE cable I have lying around (which is quite a few). Also tried no IDE at all. No difference.
I'm at my wits' end! I am thinking the board is dead, since the PSU seems to test out, and on the rare occassion when the machine does boot normally, it runs with perfect stability for days and days in either XP or OS X, never had any sudden shutdowns out of nowhere.
Thanks for any help, all you Obi Wans out there.
Here's the specs:
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Dual-Core - 2.2GHz
Motherboard: Asus M2NBP-VM
2gb RAM (two sticks, 1 Patriot and 1 Crucial, tried together and individually)
320 gb SATA Hard Drive
160 gb IDE Hard Drive
LG DVD-RW IDE optical drive
Primo P4 ATX Mid Tower Case with 500w Power Supply
Added a GeForce 7600 PCI x16 for OS X
Added a Realtek 8139 PCI ethernet card for OS X
I am NOT doing any overclocking.
Thing's I've tried:
-- CMOS Battery (CR2032) was dead, at least my tester showed it just in the red, right below the green, so I thought, "AHA!" and went to get a new battery today. Tested it before installing, it showed a full charge. Did the jumper thing on the motherboard that clears the CMOS cache. Put in new battery - no difference. Dammit!
-- Backside of motherboard shorted against the case? I pulled the motherboard, which was carefully stood-off when I installed it, completely out of the case, laid it on a dry towel, and connected only the 2 power connectors to the board, monitor to the on-board video connector, and one stick of RAM (tried both sticks, one at a time). Attempted to power up to see if I'd get the POST beep - it should POST and show me the BIOS screen even if no drives are connected, right? But nothing. Just the PSU, CPU and case fans come on. No beep, no BIOS screen.
-- Power Supply? Pulled the power supply motherboard connector. Using a paper clip, I jumped the green and black pins to power up the PSU while the connector was unhooked. The PSU fan runs fine. With a digital multimeter, I tested all pins on the 24-pin ATX power connector, plus the 4-pin CPU power connector. All the voltages are correct. the 3.3v, 5.0v, and 12.0v values are all spot-on. I realize that is with no load, but it is something.
-- When the machine was running in XP, the ASUS motherboard monitoring app showed all voltages and temperatures to be normal. I rarely saw the CPU go above 45 Celsius.
-- Seating of RAM, Video Card, Ethernet? Pulled everything and re-seated it. Tried both RAM sticks, one at a time.
-- IDE Issue? Tried every possible permuation of Master/Slave, Primary/Secondary on the IDE chain with my IDE devices, plus every IDE cable I have lying around (which is quite a few). Also tried no IDE at all. No difference.
I'm at my wits' end! I am thinking the board is dead, since the PSU seems to test out, and on the rare occassion when the machine does boot normally, it runs with perfect stability for days and days in either XP or OS X, never had any sudden shutdowns out of nowhere.
Thanks for any help, all you Obi Wans out there.