Fried MB?

[Lucifers_Ghost]

So here's the story.

I left the house with my computer running. Got home. It was still running but frozen. Fine. Powered off. Left it for about 15 minutes then rebooted. Power goes on, hard drives spin, then stop; then it just sits there and the monitor doesnt come (led light stays orange and doesnt go green). Powered down again. Powered up. Same thing.

Disconnected cd and dvd burner, disconnected 2nd ide drive and only left primary ide. Same thing. Pulled about video card and tried another one. same thing. Unplugged primary ide drive hoping it will go directly into the bios. No dice.

I have no more replacement parts so I cant do much more testing. What is the likely villain? MB? Memory? Cpu?

Any thoughts?

LG

[ozymango]

I'd try pulling the RAM and then power it up, see if it beeps at you at all or not. If the MB is good and assuming your speaker is working/connected, if there's no memory then it should give you an interesting assortment of long and short beeps.

But if you pull the RAM and power it on and still nothing ... then it's pretty much gotta be the board.

[rallynavvie]

Power supply.

[Lucifers_Ghost]

Well, after some more testing, the computer is up and running. I took everything out and installed back in one by one. The two HD's are in and running. The problem seems to be either with my dvd burner, my secondary ide cable, or the mb.

When I dont have the ide cable plugged into the secondary ide slot, the computer boots up fine. When I plug it in without a drive, it doesnt boot. When I install one of 3 optical drives (dvd burner, dvd rom, cd burner), no more booting.

I cant believe its ALL 3 optical drives. Could an ide cable just stop working? Could just the secondary ide plug on a motherboard fail to function when the rest of the mb works fine?

LG

[smearbrick1]

Power supply.

Ditto

[Lucifers_Ghost]

Power supply? Really? Even though it boots up and runs fine with everything else plugged in EXCEPT for the optical drive?

Its a 400 watt switching psu. Its obviously still working.

Wow. Thats the last thing I would have thought of.

Thanks again ...

LG

[rallynavvie]

Power supply is the first thing I go to with that sort of outage. You'll still get fans spinning up and even hard drives going but it's the rails to the board that are usually gone. I'd keep an eye out for that happening again and then if you have a spare PSU put that in there and see if it keeps giving you trouble.

[Lucifers_Ghost]

Allllright. Get this ...

Sooo I took the 2nd hard drive off the primary cable and put it on the secondary cable and it works. I then plugged in the optical on the primary cable and it works. If I go BACK to having both drives on the primary cable and optical on the secondary cable, the optical stops working.

Thats messed up haha

LG

[smearbrick1]

Jumper setting issues? IDE cable issues?

[Lucifers_Ghost]

I thought it might be the cable before I got it to work with a hard drive. If the cable was broken, I would assume it would either work or not work. As it is now, its working with a hard drive, but not with an optical drive.

Sadly, I never thought of jumper settings. I will try that when I get home. However, all the jumpers are the same as they were before and the previous setup (2 HD's on primary, 1 optical on secondary) was up and running for about 18 months. But I'll check anyway ....

LG

[ROF]

Based on what's been posted I'm going to say the IDE cable is bad.

They are relatively cheap to replace so even if it's not the problem at least you have this bright looking cable inside your case. IDE cables(ribbon) are the most twisted cabling inside our machines. These twists and turns combined with the heat can cause an IDE ribbon cable overtime to break or short itself out. The cable may look OK after you flatten it out, but the wires inside are so small that you may never know which one is causing problems. You should see some of the machines I've worked on. The ribbon is so stretched and so twisted and coated with dust that it's a wonder data is still transmitted reliably.

Like I said, their relatively inexpensive cost is what would make this fix easy on your wallet.

[Lucifers_Ghost]

A buddy of mine had a spare cable and it does the same thing....

I fold!! :P

LG

[Lucifers_Ghost]

Well as it turns out, it WAS the cable afterall. I tried a third and final cable and now everything is working fine.

Thank you all very much for the advice, suggestions, and input.

LG