[Novalug] Dead Computer Diagnosis

[Peter Larsen]

gregory pryzby wrote:
> I didn't see anything about the disk. 
> 
> Does the disk spin up? If you are brave, you can 'lift' the disk and
> if it has spun up, you will 'feel' the gyro going. 
> 
> If the disk is working, move it to another machine. 
> 
> My guess is disk is dead. If that is not it, the system just quit.
> This has happened to me in the past as my machines run 24x7 for years
> 5+) until they just die.

Since there's no POST beep it sounds like the BIOS doesn't get loaded.
So test/replace the PSU first. If the PSU work, it may be the mobo or 
CPU. Usually mobo failures are results of overload, and you'll see "burn 
marks" on it. CPU failures happens too, but you should get bios beeps 
for that. If it was the disk you would be told that either it couldn't 
find the disk, or that there were errors on it.

HOWEVER - a quick fix can be simply to move the disks to a new but 
similar computer and continue from there.

If someone moved the box it could be as simple as a wire that "popped" 
out from the mobo. It's happend to me ONCE back in the Pentium I days.

I've lost a lot of PSUs in the last few years. I don't know if the 
quality is just getting low or what's going on. I invested in a $15 PSU 
tester, and it's been very handy.

Regards
   Peter Larsen
> 
> On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 08:46:39AM -0500, David A. Hammond 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.
> 
> 
> 
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