Power to board, but no POST

[Andrewcc]

So, once again I'm having a POST issue. I turned the machine off friday night, and when I came back to it today (Sunday) I hit the power button like always, and the system fans spun up, as did the drives, everything seemed to work except the thing won't POST. I've had this problem before and RMA'd the board. The new one worked for a while, then had the same thing happen, but upon further inspection there was a screw shorting stuff out.

So, today, I have done the following:
-Cleared and Reset the CMOS (battery out, no power for 2 hours)
-Reseated all cards and plugs
-Removed board from case, and tried to POST it that way
-Tried lower voltage RAM in all slots

None of those things have helped and I'm getting really really sick of this. Any help would be appreciated.

Components:
E6600
Asus P5K Deluxe
2 Gig crucial Ballistix
X800XL
420 Watt Enermax PSU

 

[jackschmittusa]

Is there any burn damage at the point of the short?

 

[Andrewcc]

No, there wasn't. I'm not even entirely sure that it was a "short" exactly. All I know is that it worked out of the case, so I placed it on the risers with no screws. It still worked, so I put the screws in one at a time. After I put one of them in, it wouldn't POST, so I backed the screw back out half a turn, and it worked fine after that. I wasn't sure what to call it exactly, so I called it a short. But no, there's not any physical evidence of an issue at that screw's point of contact.

Edit:
So I've been running RAM through all the combinations of sticks/slot and I got it to POST/boot with one stick of the Ballistix in slot 2. If I try to put two sticks in, or move the working stick around, it goes back to not POSTing. I'll run MEMtest in the morning to see if that's what the deal is....but....I dunno.

 

[robisbell]

human installation error, leading to shoorting of the mobo itself, leading to system failure, rma the mobo and maybe look at replacing the case risers and screws.

 

[jackschmittusa]

robisbell

So, you're one of those guys that asks a company to replace something you broke?

What would be the purpose of replacing the stand-offs and screws?

 

[Andrewcc]

So, I've messed around with it quite a bit, and I've more....precisely located the problem.

I have one particular stick of Ballistix that the machine will POST, boot, and run with. However, the matched stick of Crucial will not POST when installed on its own, or with the good stick.

I thought perhaps it was just that the memory had decided to crap out after 6 months, but then I tried to run on some Samsung RAM that I pulled out of another (working) system. With either (or both) of the Samsung dimms installed, I can't POST.

Now I have no bloody idea what's going on. In theory I could RMA the Ballstix to see if the new memory helped, but if it was just bad RAM, wouldn't the system boot with the Samsung RAM?

 

[robisbell]

it's not the memory that's bad, it's the mobo.