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PC not booting after new case

R

rage4order

Gawd
Joined
Oct 4, 2004
Messages
795
This may be a bit long so bear with me- I have a pc for my kids in our game room. The case has a door covering the power button, drives, etc. Well, the hinges broke so my kids would just leave it hanging from the front panel wires. I don't know how long it has been like this, but I finally noticed a bunch of the panel wires were broken from the door hanging down. So, I buy a new case, transfer everything into the new case and turn the pc on. It powers on, and I feel the HDD turn on but that's all that happens- no bios screen or nothing! Not even any beeps(btw, no case speaker so that might explain this). I've double and triple checked all my connections and can't figure out why it doesn't boot. I even cleared the cmos. Could those broken wires somehow have shorted something out on my board? I don't have a spare board so I'd have to buy a new one to check that theory. Any suggestions?
Info: board is Asrock xtreme 3, Phenom X2 cpu. new case is a HAF912
 
Take the PC outside of the motherboard and start it up with the screwdriver. It might be a possible case short.
 
Make sure mobo power connections are firmly seated and you have connected both of them, maybe give them a nice blow if it's dusty. Also could be a memory issue too... Did you remove the ram?
 
unlikey but has happened to ppl i know is the board mounted the case itself or with the standoff's? :eek:
 
I'll probably go ahead and pull the mobo out, unplug everything and start from the beginning. I have unplugged and plugged both power connectors already too. I basically only dc'd the drives and the front panel connections when I moved the board to the new case. I haven't checked the memory yet either but as far as I know, nothing was wrong with it before the swap.
@fightingfi- I do have the standoffs installed. ;)
 
I've had a stray screw behind a mobo cause hell before. Try with everything disconnected from the mobo, Everything. Then Clean the gold contacts on ram and blow out the ram slots and reseat them. And then connect just the power and a video card and then a monitor. Then trip the power pins with a screw driver. It should boot up with video. If it does then connect the booting HDD.
 
Listen to Dangman and test the motherboard outside of the case.

If you have a case short, one solution is to buy some fiber washers and place them between the motherboard and the case standoffs.
 
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Ok, I've pulled the board and tried to boot outside the case- same result. I unplugged everything except the video card and tried to boot- nothing. no screen or anything. I checked all my standoffs and connections and reinserted board into case- same result. NOTHING! I'm leaning towards my board has somehow gone bad. Any other suggestions?
 
I don't think the wires to the front panel can cause damage if shorted because about half of them are grounds, and the rest are connected to +3.3V or +5V through resistors that limit the current to safe values even if shorted forever.

I'd hook up a speaker to the motherboard pins. If you get no sound from it, it may be a piezo speaker and require the connections to be reversed, but magnetic speakers don't care about polarity. If the motherboard works at all, the speaker should beep even if there's no RAM installed, and one test is to run without RAM to make it do that.

Is the power supply connected directly to the video card's power socket? Cards with those sockets often won't work without that. Or could the BIOS configuration be set to use internal or PCI video instead of PCI-E video? I recently had to plug in an ancient PCI video card to see the BIOS setup and configure the video correctly.

Have you tried another PSU or measured the voltages with a meter? Check +5Vstandby (purple wire), +5V (red wires), +12V (yellow), and +3.3V (orange or brown).

What anti-static precautions have you been taking? I hope you haven't been wearing shoes or socks while working on the computer.
 
I'll do the speaker hook up and see what happens. I haven't checked any of my voltages yet either. Nothing on my BIOS should have been changed, but then again, anything could have happened. Like I said, this is my kids' computer and I don't even have any idea how long it had been since it stopped working.
 
Check the MB leds for power. Also check that the RAM is fully seated. In fact, just go ahead and reseat the ram.
 
well, after doing everything I could think of AND the suggestions from above, no dice! I even swapped the psu from my working pc in and still didn't work. so, I ordered a motherboard and swapped it out and voila! It booted right up! Don't know what happened to my other board but apparently it went bad somewhere. Thanks for all the input everyone!
 
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