Motherboard does not boot after hard power off

H

hruodr

I powered of with the switch a computer, it does not boot anymore, no peep even if I take all memory out.

I took all peripheral out, tried with other PSU, reset the BIOS with the jumper and also took battery out for a while.

A similar problem I had before, then I took the graphics card out, then put it again after trying things like above, and then booted.
I though it was the graphics card, now I doubt.

Should I throw away the motherboard (ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3) and CPU (AMD Athlon II X4 605e).

Why I powered off with the switch?
I booted it with pxeboot, run with root mounted with nfs, and shutdown the server before the client.
 
bakul said:
bad switch? loose connection?
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No.

I have a power meter on the plug. When I switch on, it consumes, when hold the switch turns of and do not consume.

It seems there is no power on self test (POST), otherwise without RAM it would peep.
 
Alain De Vos said:
I have had this frequently. Power switch or uplug from power. PC is in blocked halted state.
Did you do a nice and clean "shutdown -h now"
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Of course I unplugged, disassembled the whole PC, connected the motherboard alone with speaker and other PSU,

And of course no "shutdown -h now".

I wrote all this above.
 
What about the CMOS battery? Did you remove that and let it drain?
Other than that, it smells like the CPU got damages by a power spike. But you did not tell what switch you used. The one for ACPI, the one on the PSU or maybe one in the power cord?
 
Crivens said:
What about the CMOS battery? Did you remove that and let it drain?
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Yes, I did, and I also wrote that above.

Crivens said:
Other than that, it smells like the CPU got damages by a power spike.
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It is a "silentmaxx FANLESS II 500Watt" PSU. I hope it is not the cause, I would like to use it.

Crivens said:
But you did not tell what switch you used.
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I wrote that I powered off with the switch. I mean the mechanical switch, like unplugging.
The other did not react after I shut down the server. It was the only possibility to turn off.
 
I also had something like this with one of my former machines:
When I powered it off hard by pressing the power button (when Windows crashed again that hard, not even the reset button worked anymore - Boy, what I love that kind of a well engineered OS) I needed to switch off the PSU's power switch, and remove the power cord, then press the front power button to ensure the whole system is completely powerless (LEDs on your MB need to be dark. Otherwise there is some stand-by voltage left.) Otherwise the PC wouldn't react to the normal power button anymore.
I did not actually analyzed the source of that, but it's somewhere in the cooperation between MB and PSU. I suspect some capacitor in the PSU still charged, still telling the PSU a state not changed, so it refuses to work.

I wouldn't trash the MB.
1. I would check, why the machine needs to be powered off by the power button (so often) - that's not the common way - and what needs to be fixed it shuts down by poweroff reliably (btw. unlike Linux under FreeBSD
-h only halts the machine, but not powering it off, you need to use -p as the option for shutdown(8) to do that.
2. Then I would consider to exchange the PSU first; maybe even one with a better efficiency factor.
 
Maturin said:
I needed to switch off the PSU's power switch, and remove the power cord, then press the front power button to ensure the whole system is completely powerless (LEDs on your MB need to be dark.
Click to expand...
What power you mean remains after disassembling the PC and connecting the bare motherboard to another PSU?!

CeXP1917 said:
Did you check with new CMOS battery? HW is old, some old hw cannot start with empty battery.
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I will try that!
 
What do you mean by "doesn't boot"? Do you mean it doesn't power up at all? Are the fans spinning up? Or is it powering up but you only get a black screen with a blinking cursor? Or is it showing more than that on the screen? If so, what is it showing?
 
hruodr said:
What power you mean remains after disassembling the PC and connecting the bare motherboard to another PSU?!
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None of those.
I mean the stand-by power remaining in the machine, which is needed to make the front power button work (and other things) and is still available in the machine as long as the PSU is active and attached to the grid.
To get your machine completely powerless you don't need to completely disassemble it.
Or, to put it otherwise:
I figured out, that I can reuse the front power button again when I made the machine completely powerless first, for what I don't need to disassemble it completely into all its modules.
If you already tried that, then my situation does not fit yours, and I cannot help you.
But if you don't, I recommend that was worth a try, before you remove RAM modules, or trash your MB.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
What do you mean by "doesn't boot"? Do you mean it doesn't power up at all? Are the fans spinning up? Or is it powering up but you only get a black screen with a blinking cursor? Or is it showing more than that on the screen? If so, what is it showing?
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Absorbs electricity (I have a meter on the plug), the MB is fanless, but the fan of the PSU moves, the screen remains blank without cursor.

Since without RAM it does not peep as it should do, it has probably not reached the point of testing RAM and much less the graphics.
 
Checking the PSU first step would be to simply only connect a spinning disc and see if it spins up.
WRT switches, the switches in many a power distribution cords will generate quite an arc when flipped. When that collapses, there is a voltage spike. Maybe your PSU is gone. Maybe something deeper down in the list like a capacitor on the MB.

hruodr said:
blank with cursor.
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So some of the graphics is working? Is that right?
 
CeXP1917 said:
Did you check with new CMOS battery? HW is old, some old hw cannot start with empty battery.
Click to expand...
The battery was almost 'empty', but putting a new one did not help.

Crivens said:
Checking the PSU first step would be to simply only connect a spinning disc and see if it spins up.
Click to expand...
I tried with other PSU, the MB has a standby light when it gets electricity and it lights, when I turn with the MB on, then the power meter I have in the plug jumps from 0 consume to about 39w.

Crivens said:
So some of the graphics is working? Is that right?
Click to expand...
It was a lapsus. no blinking cursor, no graphic, no peep without RAM.
 
Does the PSU have a voltage selector switch to select 120 or 220 from the wall? I've seen in the past someone here in the US (we have 120 from the wall) had it set to 220 and wound up with similar symptoms.
I'm not sure how many PSUs have a selector anymore, just figured I'd toss the idea out there.

If you have a voltmeter/multimeter it may be worthwhile to check outputs of the PSU that should quickly let you know if something happened internally.
 
hruodr said:
It was a lapsus. no blinking cursor, no graphic, no peep without RAM.
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Thought so. Just wanted to make sure. Maybe this is the CPU having given up the ghost, it's the part with the smallest transistors in the system (and maybe the most). Do you have the chance to change that? Might be a lot cheaper than the complete mainboard. Access to a thermal imaging system will tell you where the system is using power, so if the rest of the board warms up but the CPU stays cold, that's a giveaway. Or if one pice of the thing heats up way beyond expectations.
 
Crivens said:
Do you have the chance to change that? Might be a lot cheaper than the complete mainboard.
Click to expand...
Perhaps simpler and cheaper is to take another mainboard with CPU and memory from an older computer as this.

But then the question is, why it happened, if the PSU is the cause.

As I wrote above, the problem was not new, I had a similar problem before, solved by chance (unknown how).

The internal graphic once worked, once only the graphic card, and now nothing.
 
Crivens said:
Do you have the chance to change that? Might be a lot cheaper than the complete mainboard.
Click to expand...
Perhaps simpler and cheaper is to take another mainboard with CPU and memory from an older computer as this.

But then the question is, why it happened, if the PSU is the cause.

As I wrote above, the problem was not new, I had a similar problem before, solved by chance (unknown how).

The internal graphic once worked, once only the graphic card, and now nothing.
 
CeXP1917 said:
what if you try to start system while south/north bridge have some pressure by hand?
Click to expand...
I do not know how to do it!

Here an image of the MB:
mb2.jpg
 
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