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HELP!: Power On...< 2 seconds...POWER OFF!!

M

musixian

Member
I'm hoping someone has had some experience with this.

First of all, this is an AMD Athlon system with a ABIT KT7a-Raid motherboard.

Yesterday, the system is running fine - I've never had any problems with it.
Today I noticed the screen saver isn't kicking in - this is my one and only
symptom of the problem (unfortunately). After noticing the monitor on still
a few hours later, I conduct a proper shutdown to let things reset (just in
case).

I go to power it up a couple of hours later and it simply goes ON....OFF
within a couple of seconds or less.

Now just to inform, and by no means to brag, I'll let you know I'm A+
certified and also teach courses for Hardware repair and A+ certification,
so I've done most of the "logical" troubleshooting steps already.

Things I've tried (with obviously no success):
1) disconnected all drives
2) removed/reseated RAM (only one stick so I couldn't put in different
slots, etc.)
3) moved fans to other fan options (cpu to fan1/fan2, fan3, etc.) - (per
Pauls Unofficial KT7A-raid FAQ here:
http://www.sudhian.com/showfaqs.cfm?fid=2 )
4) ran system by itself on it's power strip (y'never know)

I haven't yet tried cursing and screaming at the system, and I'm not sure
why considering my part-time video production income depends on this
running!

Also, I'm not positive but I think some storms came through our area last
night. I'm kinda wondering if this might be surge-related? My guess is not
since everything else seems good and the system was running this morning.
But I don't know.

 
Forget the cursing and screaming. You gotta dangle the mobo over the toilet by its ATX cable and really show it who's boss 😉

But seriously, look over the board closely for any bulging and/or leaking capacitors. ABIT was known for this at about that era, due to a glut of badly-manufactured capacitors on the market around that time.

Other than that, try a new, high-quality power supply in the 300W+ range and do some cross-checking of whatever parts you can test in a known-working system. Good luck bro! 😀
 
Interesting that you mention leaking caps. Of the two suggestions I received thus far on this, both have stated the caps as being a problem for this era of Abits. I haven't looked yet, but I sure will.
 
Well, fortunately or unfortunately, I see no visibly bad caps. Obviously that doesn't mean one of them can't be bad, but I can't rely on it either.

Any other suggestions? Does it sound like a power supply gone kaput? Does it sound like a spike-related problem (lightning)?
 
Cleared the BIOS with jumper yet? Sounds like the CPU fan sensor or temp monitoring is kicking you back off.

I could be the powersupply too though as a bad one of those can make all kinds of havoc.
 
You said you swapped the fans around but did you verify that your CPU fan was in fact spinning? If it's pooched, it's pooched no matter which fan connector you connect to! Other than that, I'd swap the power supply for a known-good and see what happens. My power supply went last week and my message to the world is "Check the power supply first!" (Then you don't run around for 2 days testing everything else like I did!) 😉
 
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