How *not* to treat your computer.
Feb. 8th, 2007 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kengrI've been trying to get a friend's system working.
When he and his wife came down for a visit a few weeks back, we knew that *at least* the power supply fan was bad.
He'd been running it that way for months before it finally quit working.
A quick check proved that the power supply was dead. We got a new one, still didn't get things going. But we got a beep code saying the video was bad.
I tried a card from my old tower. The computer didn't complain, but no video.
So they left it and I was going to work on it when I got a chance to borrow a workbench from a friend. That didn't happen so I started fighting stuff here. And finding that in the months since I'd last had my "work area" usable, several things had hidden themselves.
I dug out the mini-tower that I was going to trabsplant the guts of into a Server case so I'd have a "dedicated" box for things like copying drives (the new case has 5 externally accessible 5.25" drive bays and two externally accessible 3.5" ones.Just what I needed for the removable drive racks and the like.
Discovered that the holes for the standoffs for the motherboard have threads that don't match the standoffs from the old case (looks like an English vs metric thing). So I had to table that for now.
So I went for the old tower that this tower replaced. Discovered that my old video board I'd tried using in the busted computer is broken, but the card from the busted machine was working (though it has an onboard fan that isn't working, so its getting *really* hot) So I just needed the 200 gig drive I use for backing up user HDs before doing things that could be a problem (like running them on a different hardware setup).
I found that after digging for two days. Couldn't find the controller card it needs for working on older machines like this.
Finally got Chrissy to run me to ENU where I picked up another one. Got a customer returned one for $20. Figured I could use another even after I find the missing one (I suspect I left it installed in this box after I found out it didn't need one).
His drive was a 120 gig, so it didn't need the controller. Only had 55 gig used. It took 5 hours to back it up. (ancient 500 MHz box)
That was fun too. The controller card didn't work at first. Had to move it to another slot. And the SCSI card in the box wouldn't unless it was in that slot. So no CD.
Discovered that the 120 gig was so fragmented that I couldn't restore the backup to one of the 80s I had on hand. So I tried restoring it to a 250 I had on hand to backup this box.
Took more hours to do the restore. And the old machine will boot off it, but won't finish loading Win2k. "Missing boot device:"
So I decided to see if the CPU from his box was bad. I had a slightly newer motherboard that had been a "spare" (I'd been going to use it in this box, but thhought it was bad. So I got a much newer board. And then found out that the original problem had been a power supply going bad)
Got the motherboard out of his system. And discovered that he needs a new one. Because the four electrolytic capacitors closest to the CPU (*stupid* location btw) were *cooked*. Literally. There were mounds of brown, crumbly stuff on top that was the boiled out of them.
Folks, this is what happens when you ignore things like overheating or flaky fans. If your motherboard has monitoring software (all ASUS ones do, so do several other brands) *use* it. Keep an eye on themperature and on fan speed. Or this could be you.
When he and his wife came down for a visit a few weeks back, we knew that *at least* the power supply fan was bad.
He'd been running it that way for months before it finally quit working.
A quick check proved that the power supply was dead. We got a new one, still didn't get things going. But we got a beep code saying the video was bad.
I tried a card from my old tower. The computer didn't complain, but no video.
So they left it and I was going to work on it when I got a chance to borrow a workbench from a friend. That didn't happen so I started fighting stuff here. And finding that in the months since I'd last had my "work area" usable, several things had hidden themselves.
I dug out the mini-tower that I was going to trabsplant the guts of into a Server case so I'd have a "dedicated" box for things like copying drives (the new case has 5 externally accessible 5.25" drive bays and two externally accessible 3.5" ones.Just what I needed for the removable drive racks and the like.
Discovered that the holes for the standoffs for the motherboard have threads that don't match the standoffs from the old case (looks like an English vs metric thing). So I had to table that for now.
So I went for the old tower that this tower replaced. Discovered that my old video board I'd tried using in the busted computer is broken, but the card from the busted machine was working (though it has an onboard fan that isn't working, so its getting *really* hot) So I just needed the 200 gig drive I use for backing up user HDs before doing things that could be a problem (like running them on a different hardware setup).
I found that after digging for two days. Couldn't find the controller card it needs for working on older machines like this.
Finally got Chrissy to run me to ENU where I picked up another one. Got a customer returned one for $20. Figured I could use another even after I find the missing one (I suspect I left it installed in this box after I found out it didn't need one).
His drive was a 120 gig, so it didn't need the controller. Only had 55 gig used. It took 5 hours to back it up. (ancient 500 MHz box)
That was fun too. The controller card didn't work at first. Had to move it to another slot. And the SCSI card in the box wouldn't unless it was in that slot. So no CD.
Discovered that the 120 gig was so fragmented that I couldn't restore the backup to one of the 80s I had on hand. So I tried restoring it to a 250 I had on hand to backup this box.
Took more hours to do the restore. And the old machine will boot off it, but won't finish loading Win2k. "Missing boot device:"
So I decided to see if the CPU from his box was bad. I had a slightly newer motherboard that had been a "spare" (I'd been going to use it in this box, but thhought it was bad. So I got a much newer board. And then found out that the original problem had been a power supply going bad)
Got the motherboard out of his system. And discovered that he needs a new one. Because the four electrolytic capacitors closest to the CPU (*stupid* location btw) were *cooked*. Literally. There were mounds of brown, crumbly stuff on top that was the boiled out of them.
Folks, this is what happens when you ignore things like overheating or flaky fans. If your motherboard has monitoring software (all ASUS ones do, so do several other brands) *use* it. Keep an eye on themperature and on fan speed. Or this could be you.
