Dead MD

[darrenmason]

I had my main lounge MD give up last night on me. It has been working pretty faultlessly probably for over a year and a half.

It was turned off by holding down the power button and then wouldn't turn back on again.

Symptoms are;
-no front light coming on or fans starting up when the power button is pressed
- motherboard (M2NPV-VM) light is coming on

I have already tried a new power supply and checked the power switch connections but I am stuck and what to do next.
What are some ideas for diagnosing this? Ideas?

[colinjones]

I would suggest pulling the CMOS battery out and either leaving it for a day to discharge, or most mobos have a jumper that you can make to discharge it instantly. I have seen that happen before on mobos where the CMOS memory for BIOS is either corrupted or not initialised yet...

[abletechnician]

If ya got a spare pc play swaptronics...

[donpaul]

Your power button is probably stuck. Pull the power plug from the motherboard terminal. If you have a reset button, move that plug over and use the reset button to power on, if no reset button, you'll need to splice in a new button for power or carefully do the screwdriver contact trick.

Good luck, don't fry your MB.

[darrenmason]

Thanks all.

Colin - will try that. Certainly a conceivable scenario.

Donpaul - I was suspect of the power switch and already tried what you suggested (both with reset switch and temporarily shorting the motherboard pins to simulate the button). both had no effect

abletechnician - not too much to swap. The pc only has 1 stick DDR2 RAM and the CPU. Unfortunately, I don't have any other AM2 setups to swap the CPU, will try a RAM swap to see if that helps

Still open to any other things to try....

[donpaul]

Buy a Dell gx280 from ebay and add a low profile pci-e GeForce 7200. It should run you around $100 and works perfect! Runs UI2 and practically silent.