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PC not booting up, help please

J

jaylek55

Senior member
Here's the situation. Was on the computer just surfing the web, when the computer froze. No BSOD or anything, just a frozen cursor and unresponsive. Held down the power switch to shut it down, counted to 15 and then powered it up again. Machine turns on, but nothing on the screen and the HDD light is on full time. No blinking, no beeps, nothing. Shut it down again via the power switch and tried again, same thing. Tried shutting off the system by flipping the PSU's power. This time I get a message on the screen that overclocking has failed and that defaults would be enabled. (I do not OC and this is a MSI feature after powering the system on/off 3 times in succession.) I press a key to continue but nothing.

I powered the system down and open it up. First thing I noticed was a plastic pushpin laying on top the GPU. I look around and find that the standoff is from the Nvidia C72P heatsink (I believe this is the Northbridge chip for the MSI P7N SLI Platinum). I check around for a spring, but can't seem to find any floating around the case. Jiggled the case around but I don't here anything moving around inside. So I checked all my cable connections. Everything seems fine. Tried swapping out the GPU with another card (from the machine I'm typing this out from) and still nothing. Tried reseating the RAM, no change.

So I'm at a loss. I don't want to assume anything, but is the standoff from the Nvidia C72P chip the issue here? Is there anything I can do about it? Or am I dealing with something entirely different. I mean the PC is getting power and there are no beeps to tell me that something is wrong. Everything was fine until today. No hiccups, BSODs or anything that would have signaled a problem. Anyone have any ideas? Any assistance would be appreciated.
 
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Disconnect everything that isn't absolutely essential for it to boot. This includes USB devices, hubs, hard drives, dvd drives disconnect all of them. Try booting If you get a POST then try reconnecting each device one at a time and see if one of them cause it to do it again. If still no go then remove all but 1 memory module try and boot if no post switch that module out for another and try to boot again. Still won't boot dismount the board and make sure that missing spring didn't end up somewhere it shopuldn't have. If none of this helps and you are sure your vid card is good I vote bad motherboard.

Have to say I had a motherboard do much the same and it turned out to be a bad board.
 
Thank you for the advice, NesuD.

Was already disconnecting the system as you suggested. When I removed the motherboard from the case, I found the spring. So that was a plus.

Tried powering up the system with only the GPU, 1 stick of RAM and CPU. After being off for a while with no power, the machine tries to post (I see the MSI logo and I hit tab), but then it just freezes. I have tried clearing the CMOS to see if that does anything and no change. Tried several times to get the machine to post with no luck. No lights on the KB like the first time it tried to post or video.

Anything else you can suggest to try or shall I start looking for a replacement?
 
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