Abhishake's dead system

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

Please use a meaningful subject line.

On Friday 11 April 2003 04:01 pm, Abhishake Pathak wrote:
> I had a hardware question if that is ok.  One of my
> machines kept restarting and eventually stopped
> working which i was not there to notice.  My first
> guess was that it was the cpu as the cpu fan was not
> running.

Do you mean at this point the system was working (between spontaneois 
reboots)?  This is important.

> that seems to be fine as well.  the only thing left is
> the motherboard.  my processor fan and another fan
> attached to the motherboard do not seem to be getting
> any power.  nothing shows up on the monitor when i
> turn on the power.  and at the other end of the
> motherboard a green led lights up when powered up.
> i'm inclined to say that it is the motherboard but i
> cannot confirm that for sure.  can someone please
> point me in the right direction as to what i could do?

OK, now we're getting somehere.  There's one problem in figuring out what's 
wrong, though.

Some of the wires going between the power supply and the motherboard are used 
for the motherboard to tell the power supply whether the motherboard is happy 
with itself and the power coming out of the power supply.  If the power 
supply puts out undervoltage, overvoltage, fluctuations, etc, the motherboard 
will tell the power supply to shut down.  The motherboard will also do this 
if it senses a problem on the motherboard, CPU, and sometimes memory.  The 
purpose of all this is to ensure that no more damage occurs.

As a result of this, the symptoms you are seeing could be caused by either the 
power supply or something on the motherboard.  You can't really tell without 
swapping one.  However, the green light on the motherboard leads me to 
believe that the power supply is at least working somewhat.  If the problem 
were the RAM or video, the motherboard would usually beep one of several 
special patterns.  Is the speaker hooked up to the motherboard?

If you can, bring the computer to the installfest tomorrow.

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DDDD   David Kramer                   http://thekramers.net
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