8KHA+ Wouldn't POST & Now Nothing...

[Beard]

Hi,

This is going to be a little long for me to explain it all. I've been running this 8KHA+ since last October, I believe, without any trouble from it whatsoever. Now I'm a little stumped as to what is wrong, what caused it and how I should fix it.

The other day I went to reboot and Windows said that my boot.ini file was corrupted. After trying to fix it, I realized that the damage was physical and the hard drive would need replacing. No biggie...I was wanting to disable ACPI with a new Windows XP installation so that I could assign separate IRQ's to my modem, sound card and video card anyways. They had all been using IRQ 11 with ACPI enabled and P-n-P on. Now I have them all assigned to their own IRQ, video on 11, modem on 9 and sound card on 10.

I bought a new hard drive and then partitioned, formatted and installed XP. Installed Via AGP 4.10 and 27.42 Detonator drivers.
Then I put my usual software in and started make some Windows services adjustments to get back to the way that it had been.

Everything was running smooth. I decided to do some benchmarking with Sandra and I was getting real close to my previous performance. So...I realized that I needed to download a new copy of 3DMark 2001 SE to check my video performance too.

Now it gets weird...

I only have a dial-up connction here. Of course the 40MB download of 3DMark takes forever on it. I fell asleep while it
was downloading. After waking a couple of hours later, I jumped up and checked the computer. I moved the mouse to wake up the monitor and NOTHING. Hmmm...Turned the monitor off then back on and realized that wasn't the problem. The fans were still all running. Then I looked on the front and noticed that the LEDs weren't lit. Opened the case and the diagnostic LED was FF. I rebooted with the power button, the fans came on and the LED was stuck at FF. It didn't POST at all. The LED didn't go through any the other codes, just stuck at that first FF. I tried it a few times and the same thing. Oh, and the LED by the memory was lit up too.

I let it sit for a couple of hours and tried powering up again. This time the fans just "bumped" one time and no power to the MB at all anymore.

Do you think that I fried the MB or CPU or both??? And what could have possibly caused this to happen? I was sleeping at the time, of course, so I really don't know what caused it at all. I doubt that it was a temperature issue. All the fans were still running afterwards and the chip never gets above 47C at full load.

I don't have any extra parts here to try out. I imagine that I'll have to get a new MB and CPU but I don't want to buy anything yet until I'm sure what I need. I'd REALLY like to know what actually caused this to happen so I don't do it again!

I haven't overclocked the MB or video card any I've been using Turbo memory settings, at 2.7V and core voltage at 1.75V .

Hopefully someone can figure this out. I can't afford to pull out too many more hairs

Thanks,
Beard

PS
I'm going to post this at amdmb too.
I need all the help that I can get.

[Holst]

Remove the board from the case.

Clear the CMOS

Try running with just the PSU, memory and CPU with the motherboard resting on a book.

Short the power on pins with a screwdriver (carefully)

Try swapping your two sticks of memory around..diferent combinations diferent slots.

Without spare parts its hard to troubleshoot.

Your next nest step will be to take the bits to a shop..preferably one who has some technical expertese to have your parts tested.
Or a friend with PC bits on hand.

It sounds like the motherboard died (not in a disimiar way to my first 8kha+ .... slowly got worse and worse over a period of hours.

Welcome to the forum and good luck.