My Turn Now...

[onca]

Turned her on this morning, not a flicker. Fans & HDD starts up... but no POST, no beeps, nothing. Monitor goes into standby mode (ie. no output from graphics card). Can't power down by holding down Power button, have to pull the plug.

Removed every peripheral. Unplugged all cables, and plugged back in. Reseated RAMs. Took out CPU & fan, and reseated (getting thermal goo all over my fingers). Still nothing. Measured 12V connector -- 11.2V. Couldn't easily measure 5V rail. USB devices have power. So ATX is till alive by the looks of it, and that's about it.

I strongly suspect the motherboard has died (low end Gigabyte). I *hope* it's not the CPU or PSU. Now the fun part.... finding an old Socket 478 mobo dirst cheap.

Result: No Freelancer WAAAHHH!! At least I can check the boards on this old laptop:dry:

o.

[McNeo]

Ouch...good luck trying to find a socket 478 motherboard.

Also, it does sound like your motherboard has gone. The exact same thing happened to me, with the same affects you describe.

One thing, when you get a new mobo for your computer, do a stress test on the RAM. When it happened to me, it damaged my RAM and i get massive memory leaks from cold startup. The modules work fine when warmed up though...

Power to the graphics card should be there (all the fans should start spinning like normal) but the power to the CPU and RAM has gone I suspect.

[Locke]

I had the same problem last year. I had 3 RAID hard-drives and 2 disc-drives, so I thought it was my power supply. I upgraded to from 300w to 480w. It was expensive at the time, and didn't solve the problem.

I upgraded the motherboard and was relieved to find everything working again. Now I only have one HD, and one Disc-drive... so at least I could have 30 fans in my computer if I wanted.

Good luck man, I hope you get it all solved.

---

[onca]

UPDATE

It seems my PC is really frakked. Tried a brand new mobo, still nothing. That leaves either the CPU or power supply. I've borrowed another PSU and gonna try it tonight. As for the CPU, I'm told its rare but not unheard of for one to die. Wonder if I smothered it with too much thermal goo.....

So I'm still offline:(sorry to TBH for missing the cool stuff

EDIT: As far as PSU goes.... I measured the voltages with it started (short pins 3 & 14) and under load (had an old 500Mb disk plugged in). All voltages are within tolerance, except for -12V which is a bit low (or I should say high), but no one really cares about that. Tried my old PIII system running on this PSU and everything went fine. Dammit......

UPDATE 2:

New PSU installed, still doesn't frakking work. So that leaves the freakin CPU is f***ed.