My computer is reluctant to start

chili2001

Jesus! you have more patience than me. The truth is you may never find whats wrong with it. I would have given up by now and done a rebuild. Or gone and bought a shiny new fast pc! Maybe try replacing the psu as a last resort?

squeaky

chili2001 wrote: »

Jesus! you have more patience than me. The truth is you may never find whats wrong with it. I would have given up by now and done a rebuild. Or gone and bought a shiny new fast pc! Maybe try replacing the psu as a last resort?

I know - but I can't afford a new machine, nor can I afford to replace suspect items on spec.

Some things I might well be able to get through Freecycle, but for a bet I'd end up buying other "bits".

It does seem to be narrowing down to a motherboard problem. All the testing I've done seems to give the remaining hardware the all clear.

Unless I can visibly see a dodgy joint, you're right - I might never prove it. Time to price up motherboards, methinks.
Problem is - it's three years old. Last time I replaced it I also needed to buy a new processor because my then current one was not compatible, and then I had to buy a new PSU to provide the correct range of voltages. I wonder if the manufacturer still has this board available so I can do a staright swap.

basmic

squeaky wrote: »

I also noticed that I was flexing the mother board when disconnecting and reconnecting the ribbon cables - and that might go a long way to explaining why it took me more than twenty attempts to get a start this time when I've usually managed to get one between five and ten.

That's your problem right there!

Sometimes if you push on your motherboard too hard, it could fracture a solder joint and/or a track - but, in all honesty, it would take a lot of flexing. :eek:

Do you know if you've got support underneath your motherboard in all the possible screw holes, or using plastic stand-offs? Some people just screw the motherboard into the case at the corners, leaving a nice dip in the middle. Most motherboards need 6 or 9 screws/stand-offs for sturdy support.

squeaky

basmic wrote: »

That's your problem right there!

Sometimes if you push on your motherboard too hard, it could fracture a solder joint and/or a track - but, in all honesty, it would take a lot of flexing. :eek:

Do you know if you've got support underneath your motherboard in all the possible screw holes, or using plastic stand-offs? Some people just screw the motherboard into the case at the corners, leaving a nice dip in the middle. Most motherboards need 6 or 9 screws/stand-offs for sturdy support.

It wasn't me guv, honest. This all started before I stuck me grubby mits in there. Carefully grounded of course

It's hard to see for sure but it looks like it's mounted on five screws (the surrounds of which are tinned) and although there are a couple more holes in the board they aren't tinned and look way too close to tracks.
However - The two rightmost screws are about three inches from the side and all the main ribbon cables fit onto that overhanging and so flexible (and vulnerable) area. So possibly those are meant to sit on stand offs?

I've just spent two hours tracking down my motherboard - MSI KM2M-L Combo

The MSI site has "where to buy" on it and none of them were any good to me, and google hits were mostly reviews, and the majority of so called shops were in fact comparison sites (that ruddy well couldn't) and the remaining shops such as (to pick a made up name out of the air)... supertech computer supplies dot com - all turned out to be ebay bids. I don't use ebay or paypal.

I finally found a page by some magic backdoor at MSI :_

http://www.msicomputer.com/reseller/distributor.asp?class=US4

Loads of resellers I need to check out - and I have no idea which of them are any good. You can forget Amazon - they have none in stock.

chili2001

You could just sign up and bid on Ebay. It really is the place to look for cheap secondhand (or new) older pc componants. Otherwise you will end up paying through the nose for one as older componants are nearly always more expensive. You could easily get a pentium 4 rebuild for around £50.

Gumption_Brash

The solutions for your problem seem to have gotten more and more complex...

For my own two penneth, I had the same symptoms. The solution was one of the hard drives. The OS, if the hard drive you are booting from is wrecked, will just keep on trying and show you nothing beyond the load screen, and give you access to the BIOS.

Having read previous posts, I gather you've tried to eliminate any hardware issues. Take one hard-drive out (completely, not just a dis-connect), give it a whirl, then do the same with the other.

To me from your first post, you mentioned you could hear one fire up but not the other - this could very well be the problem.

You've nothing to lose by trying again.

For what it's worth...

squeaky

chili2001 wrote: »

You could just sign up and bid on Ebay. It really is the place to look for cheap secondhand (or new) older pc componants. Otherwise you will end up paying through the nose for one as older componants are nearly always more expensive. You could easily get a pentium 4 rebuild for around £50.

In fact, the only place I could actually buy one at all on line was ebay. So I bit the bullet and registered.

Nearly.

It kept telling me that my computer wasn't accepting cookies. It didn't matter how much of my "protection" I removed and enabled for this one operation - it still kept telling me I wasn't accepting cookies.

Bah humbug.

And I really, REALLY, REALLY don't like paypal, or paypalaver.

squeaky

Gumption_Brash wrote: »

The solutions for your problem seem to have gotten more and more complex...

For my own two penneth, I had the same symptoms. The solution was one of the hard drives. The OS, if the hard drive you are booting from is wrecked, will just keep on trying and show you nothing beyond the load screen, and give you access to the BIOS.

Having read previous posts, I gather you've tried to eliminate any hardware issues. Take one hard-drive out (completely, not just a dis-connect), give it a whirl, then do the same with the other.

To me from your first post, you mentioned you could hear one fire up but not the other - this could very well be the problem.

You've nothing to lose by trying again.

For what it's worth...

More comples as I've (hopefully) worked through the simpler solutions which, unfortunately, didn't solve things.

The drive is certainly a possibility.- though in my defence - it really is difficult to hear; and in its own defence - I completely disconnected it - so I had only my other drive enabled (and the cd and dvd)... so what I think ought to have happened should have been an error on the order of "Missing boot sector - please place a boot disk in..."

And I never got an error.

Unless my logic is wrong, that clears drive c: as not being the cause of my problem?

squeaky

Over the last couple of days I have thoroughly swept both drives and the registry, defragged and optimised prior to doing a back up of both drives onto DVD.

Then I removed my motherboard, dusted and inspected it for possible signs of overheating, dry joints & cracks but couldn't find anything, just on the off chance that the dust was causing a problem between 2 chip pins I tried it again but with no change to the problems listed in my original and subsequent posts.

Given that the 2 prime suspects, I thought, were either drive C because the front panel LED stayed on and I wasn't convinced it was reading or as suggested it is a problem on the motherboard. Looking around I found that my cheapest option was to buy a motherboard rather than a new drive and try that. Fitted the new motherboard this morning and there has been no change.

Having had a long think I decided that, given the elimination process I've been through, such as: -

• fitting a borrowed monitor - no change
• disconnecting the CD and DVD at the motherboard - no change
• disconnecting both hard drives at the motherboard - no change
• changing out ribbon cables no change

It seemed to me that I had pretty much eliminated all of the peripherals and, earlier when I could still get the computer to start all the monitoring programmes that I had and the extras I got from here, thanks, all said that that everything was OK and in good nick. Thinking on, it occurred to me that during the POST checks it’s possible that while the power supply unit is giving out all the correct voltages and enough power to run my drives and the board etc. - it might just be that for some reason, even though it appears to be healthy the PSU could still actually fail the test because it is possible that even the test side of things is the fault.

I removed the PSU, opened it up and cleared a shed load of dust out of it. Since it was still warm I finger checked for hot components and had a good look for dry joints and any signs of overheating on tracks or varnish. Once I'd got the dust of all these inspections showed the PSU to be pristine so I put the darned thing back again.

THEN I got out my trusty digital test meter and checked the actual voltages on the connector on the motherboard. All of the pins carrying actual voltage supplies showed the correct voltage.

The pin designated as PW_OK which I assume means power OK had 5 volts on it. Which seems good to me.

However, the pin marked PS_ON which I assume means power supply on? Had zero volts on it.

So my question is should this PS_ON pin have a 5 volt signal on it to show that it is good?

Jeeze, I hope it should have a signal on it because this lack of signal on it means that I have identified my problem at last in as much as even though my power supplies are correct "the system" doesn't think so. One way or another this would make the problem solvable.

So should that pin have 5 volts on it please?

basmic

http://pinouts.ru/Power/atxpower_pinout.shtml or http://pinouts.ru/Power/atx_v2_pinout.shtml