8RDA3I = dead. unusual revival help please

[flytek]

this 8rda3i just died while running at stock. (batron 2600+, ddr400 at 1:1)
the bluescreen error said something about rebooting due to new hardware.
only FF shows up on led's now.
i have swopped every component including the battery.
i have hotflashed the bios chip to the latest available bios.
it is caseless and has a duron700 and somedr266 in it now.
it is fully unplugged with battery out for the last 12hours.
i'm going to wait a little more before retrying.

the only thing i can think of to try is to hotflash again but this time to flash those two sectors that remain unflashed usually.

can anybody give me the command to flash those sectors too?
might it in fact help?
another ideas would be a great help.

thanks for reading

[Gizmo]

I know the /f option will force it to flash a BIOS on a board other than the one it is designed for, so I assume it will also do what you want, but I do not know for sure.

If you just type 'awdflash' at the DOS prompt, you should get a help screen telling you what options are available. I think the one you want is to flash the boot block.

[flytek]

thanks for trying Gizmo.

i booted another manufacturers nf2 board with the dead 8rda3i's bios so i now know that it is not a bad bios. there must be something else wrong with the board.
i looks like it should work but it just doesn't.

funny thing is i have an 8rda+ rev1.1 that died from dodgy caps. i replaced the caps but it too shows only FF. for fun i tried this board again today and find that it also feel like it should boot. it's bios also booted the other mobo so the bios is good.
something else must have blown when the caps fried. the cpu vreg gets hot, the southbridge warms up and the other components seem to be in order. the cpu however just doesn't even get warm.

the 8rda3i shows the exact same symptoms
i just felt the southbrigde and it became blisteringly hot within a few seconds

this leads me to believe that there is another dodgy component on some nf2 mobo's that fails and leads to the immidiate FF reading. maybe it is the southbridge itself.

now one last question. the 8rda3i has a fin broken off the northbridge heatsink from fitting a fan - will this lead to rma refusal or not?

thanks again

[Gizmo]

That really depends on how picky the RMA department wants to be, and I can't answer that, although I would tend to think they will still take it for RMA.

The southbridge on ALL NF2 boards gets quite hot unless there is a heatsink. I measured temps in excess of 50 °C on mine before I put a HSF on it.

[Áedán]

Originally Posted by flytek

the 8rda3i shows the exact same symptoms
i just felt the southbrigde and it became blisteringly hot within a few seconds

Dead southbridge or chipset voltage supply. Generally any chips that get that hot in a few seconds are probably faulty. Obviously some chips are exempt from that (such as CPUs!)

[flytek]

thanks again guys.
anybody got some working spare southbridges? (or mobo's that died from something besides sb failure) i'm pretty keen to try my hand at some baking

[surlyjoe]

Originally Posted by flytek

thanks again guys.
anybody got some working spare southbridges? (or mobo's that died from something besides sb failure) i'm pretty keen to try my hand at some baking

baking is way risky, use a heat gun instead.. not that your chances are that much better

[Gizmo]

Yeah, hot-air surface-mount rework stations are basically heat guns. But reworking a board that has j-style, or even worse, LPGA style surface mounted parts is really hard, if not impossible, even with those.

Surly, am I chasing you across the boards again?