Problem getting Shuttle to power on

[leec1979]

Yesterday tthe parts for my new Shuttle arrived and last night I gleefully put them together. Once I had finished I nervously pressed the power button for the first time (as you do) and......nothing.

The system fan spins for about half a second and then the system powers off. I don't even get a chance to peek at the BIOS and it doesn't sound as if the HDD is spinning up. It also won't respond to me pressing the power button again until I remove the power cord, wait a few seconds, then plug the power back in and try again. While the power is connected the OVP LED stays on, although I'm not sure what that means.

Soooo, any ideas anyone? I've checked all of the cables and everything seems to be in nice and snug. As I understand it there are very few faults that will cause the system to power off before it can bring up the BIOS screen which is why I suspect a dodgy PSU or motherboard.

The specs are:

Shuttle SK21G
AMD Sempron 2800
1GB Kingston PC3200 RAM
Seagate Barracuda SATA HDD
Sony DVD-ROM

 

[deathwalker]

try doing a cmos reset.

 

[leec1979]

Originally posted by: deathwalker
try doing a cmos reset.

Tried that after reading it on the Shuttle support site and no joy. I'm going to try a couple of things tonight:

1) Hook up the PSU from my desktop PC and see if that makes any difference. My main thought behind this is that the OVP LED comes on when I try to power it up. It's my understanding that this is a 'Too much voltage' LED so I'll check with a PSU I know works.
2) Strip it down to nothing (Not even CPU) and see if it'll power up. If that works it's been suggested that it might need a BIOS update to support Semprons, so I'm going to stick an Athlon64 in and see if it'll boot with that.

If neither of these work I'm stumped. Any further suggestions/ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

[geecee]

I had an SN85G4V2 with a similar problem. I tried the CMOS reset, 2 different processors (A64 2800+ & a friends 3000+), 3 different memory chips (1gb noname, 512mb Rosewill & 512mb Kingston ValueRAM) and 2 different video cards (9800Pro & 9100). At the end of it all, I ended up RMA-ing it for a new one which worked on the first attempt to boot after building. The Shuttle tech I talked too theorized it could be the board or the PS. I didn't bother figuring it out as I would end up RMA-ing it regardless of which was the problem. This probably not very helpful, except in suggesting that maybe you just got unlucky and got a bad unit.

EDIT: mistyped model no.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Check all the cable connections carefully. Also, use extreme caution when connecting other power supplies. I've seen this problem many times building other systems and it usually winds up being something stupid.

 

[leec1979]

It was something stupid in the end. A bent CPU pin. I straightened it up and the machine is now happily installing Linux

Thanks for the help everyone. I'll be more craeful in seating CPUs from now on.