Bad Motherboard or Power Supply?

[ed3120]

My system suddenly won't power on. I've made no recent changes lately. I just came home to a powered off system. The power indicator LED on the case (signifying that the PC is plugged in, not that it is necessarily powered on) is lighting up. If I push on the power button, the motherboard fan, CPU fan, and power supply fans start to spin and then stop. If I connect the power jumpers on the motherboard, I can make them spin constantly. The system doesn't even try to power up. There is no noise and the hard drives do not start to spin up.

If I keep hitting the power button, eventually even the CPU and motherboard fans will even not start up. If I flick the switch on the back of the power supply to off and then wait a few seconds and turn it back on, I can get back to the point where the CPU and motherboard fans spin for a little again. If I keep doing that, eventually they stop spinning.

 

[covertxt5]

your message is a litte confusing but heres my guess - if your fans turn on but nothing else you most likely have a bad cpu.

If nothing happens at all when you press the button but the motherboard light is lit up or that led you mentioned than it may be your case power button is shot - to test this find where your case power switch is plugged into the motherboard pull it out and short out those two pins and see what happens. If it doesn't turn on you probably have either a bad ps or a bad motherboard.

Another good thing to do unplug all peripherals - like cd/dvd floppy - remove sound card or dialup modem and than try and boot it.

 

[ed3120]

I tried shorting the power switch - I get the same results. I've also tried unplugging the drives, and again, same results.

 

[faster3200]

Try clearing cmos. This happens to me on one of my comps as it is just really picky. If you have a case speaker see if it will give you a beep code.

 

[bobbknight]

Smell for burnt parts and look really carefully for the same.
But I would say a bad board.

 

[cow_moo]

I kinda had the same problem if it's an antec PSU it's probaly dead that's what happened to me nothing lit up or anthing tried to turn on nothing it also might be the motherboard because it might have a problem with the CMOS or sumtin but it might also be because of an overclock if you did one

 

[TunaSoda]

I'm having almost the same issue right now, I have 3 sata drives that used to be fine all running at the same time, but now the pc only starts with one hooked up? (any of the 3 will work by themselves but not together)

No beeps, the pc will just start for a few seconds and then shut off abruptly, then i cannot try to turn it back on till i cycle the psu switch in the back

To verify, the pc works perfectly fine with a single drive and has no issues

Very frustrating!

I don't mind buying new parts to fix this if I knew what parts need fixing!

My initial thoughts were perhaps a bad sata channel?

 

[TunaSoda]

I kinda had the same problem if it's an antec PSU it's probaly dead that's what happened to me nothing lit up or anthing tried to turn on nothing it also might be the motherboard because it might have a problem with the CMOS or sumtin but it might also be because of an overclock if you did one

Mine is also an Antec PSU