Computer won't boot at all (Power button does nothing)

[HaxorNubcake]

Last night I was using my computer normally when suddenly it just died. For a second I thought there might have been a power outage but I looked around and nothing else was affected.

Since then I've tried different power supplies, unplugged all drives, tried different power buttons, all to no avail.

I really don't care that much about the PC but would like my data on the 2 Raid 0 drives back. They are 10k rpm Western Digitial 74gb raptors.

I'm almost positive that it is motherboard failure. Do the "symptoms" seem appropriate? Also, how difficult will it be to retrieve the data on the drives? Will I be able to plug them into any other motherboard with SATA and a raid controller?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Smilin]

pull the mobo power connector. Use a paperclip to bridge the green wire to any ground (black) wire. This will trigger the power supply to come on as if the mobo told it to.

Don't run it like this for longer than it takes to see if it comes on unless you also use a resistor to provide some artificial load. Some PSUs don't care some do. You won't cause any harm just checking the power up though.

If it comes on .. mobo may be shot.
If it does not .. power supply is definately shot.

For recovery convenience: you should be able read those drives if you use an identical raid chipset (doesn't necessarily have to be same mobo).

However - I will utterly clown you in front of everyone here if you don't have backups.

 

[HaxorNubcake]

Originally posted by: Smilin
pull the mobo power connector. Use a paperclip to bridge the green wire to any ground (black) wire. This will trigger the power supply to come on as if the mobo told it to.

Don't run it like this for longer than it takes to see if it comes on unless you also use a resistor to provide some artificial load. Some PSUs don't care some do. You won't cause any harm just checking the power up though.

If it comes on .. mobo may be shot.
If it does not .. power supply is definately shot.

For recovery convenience: you should be able read those drives if you use an identical raid chipset (doesn't necessarily have to be same mobo).

However - I will utterly clown you in front of everyone here if you don't have backups.

Yup Power Supply came on (interesting tip btw thanks).

Go ahead and clown me

 

[Underclocked]

Nevermind, looks like you pretty much did all that - but reseat everything on the board and make sure cpu fan is working - test on another board or power supply. Reset bios.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: HaxorNubcake

Originally posted by: Smilin
pull the mobo power connector. Use a paperclip to bridge the green wire to any ground (black) wire. This will trigger the power supply to come on as if the mobo told it to.

Don't run it like this for longer than it takes to see if it comes on unless you also use a resistor to provide some artificial load. Some PSUs don't care some do. You won't cause any harm just checking the power up though.

If it comes on .. mobo may be shot.
If it does not .. power supply is definately shot.

For recovery convenience: you should be able read those drives if you use an identical raid chipset (doesn't necessarily have to be same mobo).

However - I will utterly clown you in front of everyone here if you don't have backups.

Yup Power Supply came on (interesting tip btw thanks).

Go ahead and clown me

Dang. No I'm not actually gonna clown you. That really sucks and I'm sure you won't be in this spot again. Don't panic yet though. I've moved raid between systems before without any problems. Heck, one time I just picked up a $30 PCI raid card that had the same promise chipset as my old mobo. Plugged it into my new mobo that was running an unused Sil raid and the drives were fine. Just whatever you do, don't initialize the raid on some other controller. You'll either be able to immediately see your data or you won't. Don't make any config changes to try to get it working.

That PSU trick is a surefire way to tell if the PSU is dead but it won't tell you with 100% certainty that it's good.

I say this from a recent painful experience. I did the paperclip trick, things looked good so I RMA'd the mobo. Turns out it was fine. I had a dead rail on the PSU but got lazy in troubleshooting and assumed. Swapping a PSU is a pain but doing that plus a mobo is awful.

To do a full test you'll need a multimeter and a 10 ohm, 10 watt resistor from radio shack. Cheap multimeter is like $19.95. Resistor is gonna be a few cents. You'll want to plug the resistor into each voltage line on the PSU (check an ATX pin out schematic on the 'net somewhere) then check the voltage in parallel and ensure that each line is +/- 10% of what it's supposed to be at (5 volt, 12 volt, 3.3 volt). I've had power supplies in the past that looked just fine until you placed that load on them and they would fall out of tolerance.

If you don't want to bust out a multimeter you could also just move the power supply over to another PC and see how it goes.

Good luck!

 

[HaxorNubcake]

I brought my two drives (74gb raptors) to my friend's house who has an nforce 2 board. My Mobo was nforce3, but the mobo and system were able to recognize the drives without any problems. I got all my data back

Thanks for the help

 

[Smilin]

That's awesome.

Now make a backup!