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Powering up and rebooting problem

mcravenufo

mcravenufo

Ravenufo's Macs
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Feb 28, 2001
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I installed a tape drive in my Dad's 1.9GHz office computer and now when the power button is pressed the CPU fan and case fan spin up for a fraction of a second and then stop and the computer will not boot. When we can get it to boot it either locks up shutsdown or reboots and then shutsdown. This morning my Dad says he can also hear the hum of the disk drive going up and down. It would click and the sound would go down, like the disk drive was slowing down.

This computer was up and running fine before we shutdown.

Detail of everything that was done:
-Replaced the power supply with a brand new one. This seemed to fix the problem because the computer would boot again but the bootup problem came back after several hours.
-The case fan was on the power supply for the CPU on the motherboard and the CPU fan was using a direct line from the power supply. I switched them around thinking that the CPU fan should be connected to the motherboard CPU fan header.
-Tape drive as slave on same ribbon cable as CDROM.
 
Honestly, it sounds like the old power supply took the motherboard with it. I've dealt with motherboard shorting quite a few times and this has all of the common symptoms. It looks like your dad needs a new motherboard.

Just for safety's sake though, I'd try the ol' paperclip test on each power supply, just to verify that the power supply did indeed take a nosedive.

Dark Assassin
 
Oh man. He is not going to like hearing that it may be his motherboard.

The second power supply was my brand new Fortron 530 and when his computer stopped booting with it we attached it to my computer and it worked fine.
 
As I said, I am confident in saying that the old power supply shorted out a capacitor or something somewhere on the motherboard, causing a faulty ground.

It's a crummy situation, believe me (I had to do this business dealings), but sometimes we simply can't foresee when electronics go bad. What type of processor is he using? I'm sure that you can find a cheap replacement that is easily better than what he had in there.

Dark Assassin
 
He is running a P4 1.9 GHz I believe with a Asus P4T motherboard. This was a computer some one built him with crappy components while I was away for a while.

I just got done talking to him on the phone. He wants to upgrade to better components but wants to insert his old hard drive without a fresh install. The main reason being time. He needs the computer up and running tonight.
 
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