[Novalug] Dead Computer Diagnosis

[Igor Birman]

Most likely option is failing power supply, second option is failing motherboard, or possibly both.  Try a different power supply first.  The problem with not being able to boot without unplugging is usually power supply.

Igor

"David A. Hammond" <hammonds at starpower.net> wrote: Hi,

I have a machine which is (nearly) dead and I need some help
getting started on diagnosing it.  There's not much to go on.

When I hit the power switch, it lights up and both fans (power
supply and cpu) spin.  Nothing else happens.  The keyboard
lights don't flash, there's no beep, and no synch is sent to
the monitor.  As best I can tell there are no diagnostic leds
anywhere on the motherboard.

What led up to this state is as follows:

This machine is primarily used as a file server, name server,
DHCP server, etc.  A couple of nights ago it wasn't serving
anything and I could not ping it, so I turned the monitor on
and found that I had no synch.  So I tried to reboot it.  It
got pretty far into the boot sequence (Fedora Core 3) and
hung.  So I tried again.  It didn't get as far so I tried
yet again.  This time it quit even quicker, so I figured maybe
it was a heat problem and unplugged it for about a half an
hour.  When I powered it back up I went into setup so I could
watch the cpu temperature.  It started at 36 C and slowly climbed to 45 C where it seemed to level off.  I then turned
it off but did not unplug it.  When I came back the next
evening, I found it in the state described at the top of this
note.

One other thing:  When I was trying the reboots the first
night, I could power the machine off with the front panel
switch but I could not power it back up unless I unplugged
it for about 10-15 seconds.  Does this give any hints?

I have a digital voltmeter, so I can check voltages out of
the power supply.  I haven't done that yet.

(Please respond to the list or to hammonds at erols.com.  I am
using webmail from work now, so the From address is probably
not right.)

TIA,
Dave
_______________________________________________
Novalug mailing list
Novalug at calypso.tux.org
http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/novalug

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://calypso.tux.org/pipermail/novalug/attachments/20061116/5ba2e945/attachment-0001.html