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captokita
Premium
join:2005-02-22
Calabash, NC
| [motherboard] Opinions
Hey gang.
Dell Dimension 5100.
Symptoms: Odd power cycling - can sit in BIOS even and just restart itself. Sometimes it'll boot, sometimes not, but always ends up as just cutting off, then back on again. At first, it had the amber blinking power light, which on Dell typically means power supply or motherboard.
What I've done: Changed power supply, no difference. Changed RAM, no difference. Removed, reseated everything I can think of, no change. All expansion cards are out of the machine, and I've unplugged all drives, leaving it to just the board, power supply, and as stated above, even sitting in BIOS, it just restarts itself. No obvious signs of swollen / leaking caps, no burn marks, etc.
Opinions? Looks to be a bad mobo. A bad CPU should error on POST - at least I think it would.... | |
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Premium
join:2001-11-22
BOOganville
clubs: 
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| This will sound like it is from left field, but you never know:
A couple months ago I thought my computer was dieing, that either the mainboard had gotten flaky or the HD was bad or something else. I tried everything I could think of and even came here asking for ideas even though I try and help others myself! I was very nervous because I cannot afford to even buy a new motherboard right now.
Well, I got suspicious that maybe I might have been infected with an undetected yet very advanced virus. My computer would freeze, during POST it would fail to do, well, POST, and sometimes it crashed. What was weird is that I would have to retry POSTs until one took. I thought, how could a virus possibly affect that???
Well, finally out of desperation, I blew out my OS install and repartitioned and reformatted and resinstalled. Suddenly the system was back to POSTing on every try. Boot up was fine, and no more lockups or crashes.
Whatever the virus was, it evidently was making my hard drive really mess with things.
I know people will say "NO WAY, IMPOSSIBLE!" But it's true, I swear.
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captokita
Premium
join:2005-02-22
Calabash, NC
| I could follow that, except the system does the above with NO drives connected - hard drive or optical - and sitting in POST it will do it as well, so it's essentially eliminated the drives as the source.
Just for the heckuvit, I tried a new HD, but it won't stay on long enough to install anything. | |
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