Am I Looking at a Dying/Dead Motherboard? Need Knowleageable Advice

[Rl'Halsinor]

I know this forum isn't a tech site per se, but as I have said in other posts I often find just as good advice here as I have in other designed tech websites. So...

I will try to keep shorter than War and Peace.

My second rig is a Pentium 3 system that is 6+ years old ASUS TUL2-C mobo w/Tualatain 1.2 MHz cpu and 512 megs of PC133 RAM (Limited due to Intel's 815 chipset). This has been rock solid but in the last three 6 months I have been experiencing stability issues. MemTest showed no errors two months ago. Lately I have had two 0x35 error crashes and according to MS it means a driver has caused serious issues and may have damaged RAM. (No infections; system was clean) Whether it is memory, vid mem, etc. it isn't clear. On the second crash my system could not display on my monitor thus I couldn't even get into my BIOS nor did it load to Windows. Award BIOS beeps meant the video controller and/or video card was shot. So...

1. Borrowed three AGP cards from a buddy of mine because there was a very good chance my video card and even possibly my AGP slot was fried. The first one gave me the error codes when I powered on but the second actually allowed me to boot to the BIOS without the errors.

2. But when I get to the BIOS there are many settings that I couldn't change. I never ran into this before and one of them was the CPU frequency which was auto set by the board at 1.44 MHz. One problem: My cpu is a 1.2 MHz. The board overclocked and I had nothing to do with it. I couldn't access the v.core either.

3. This is a jumperless board. I have always had it set in the jumperless mode -- always. But what I failed to realize was that after I cleared the old CMOS and then decided to go with a new CMOS I accidently put the tab where it disabled the jumper free setting. Only when it is in the jumperless position can one set the BIOS manually; otherwise the board does alot of things for you and you can't change them.

4. So thinking that possibly my video card isn't shot I put my card back in and when I rebooted sure enough I could get into the BIOS. However, this could only happen when the jumper free was disabled. If I put it back to jumper free, again where I have had it for 6+ years, the same error beeps would occur and no video whatsoever. Weird.

5. So I decided to go with the jumperless disabled, set BIOS settings that I could, and see if I could get into Windows. Nothing doing.

6. It gets to the first screen, HD and CD Drive load and are recognized but the Floppy fails in which I am automatically back to the BIOS.

7. I disabled the floppy in the BIOS. No go because I still get the failure message on the first screen that pops up after exiting BIOS. I physically disconnect the floppy's power source and cable. Still no go.

8. I have tried every configurration you can think of. I read on the BIOS forwards and backwards. I could even flash the very last updated BIOS ASUS has for this board, if I only could get into Windows and more importantly I need my floppy drive for this.

9. So I reconnected my floppy and when I did no power whatsoever. The mobo led light is on but right now the system seems dead. I disconnected the floppy wondering if that might have been the cause but still no power. Reconnected -- dead.


There are no leaking capacitors anywhere. I was thinking the same thing and so at the beginning of diagnosing I looked at every cap carefully thrice over. All are clean (no leaks) and no bulges.

Went to bed, and the next day I undid the floppy drive. The power came on, I could hear the HD start but I keep getting the same issues. I changed out the floppy and no power at all. Tried a third floppy and this time it powered up but everytime I keep getting the same error beeps even when I change out the AGP cards.

There is no monitor screen at all and I know it isn't my monitor or cable.

And here is a new one: Whether I have the board set at jumperless or jumper disabled I can't even get to the BIOS screen now. Before if it was set at jumper disabled (as I said earlier) it would boot to the BIOS but no further than the first screen, read the both HD and CD-ROM initializing and then kick me back to the BIOS after telling me the floppy failed.

Now it its not even doing that. I am still trying all kinds of combinations. I pretty certain it isn't my psu.


I wish there was some way to know for certain if the mobo is dead and it is I'd bury while playing taps. Something majorily isn't right. I really hate to have to spend money on another rig because we don't have it right now, but my family is in need of a second PC.

Thanks for reading this and any ideas/advice are most welcomed.

 

[XCorvis]

Here's another thing to try - a different power supply.

If your power supply is wonky and suddenly reduced the output, maybe some devices draw too much on boot and overload the PS, causing your weird intermittent problems. It might explain some things, but I'm not sure if it explains everything. Anyway if you know a guy with 3 AGP cards he can loan you, he probably has a spare power supply too.

If that's not it, I think it's safe to assume the mobo is messed up and you'll need a new system. If you were getting by on a P3 before, you can get a pretty darn cheap system and still consider it an upgrade. The Ars Technica Budget Box guide specs out a great system for the price. You could also check out older versions for an even cheaper system.
http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/guide-200801.ars/2

 

[ssampier]

Yes, try a different power supply. I am (still) amazed how often they go out.

Second, in the other thread, I was wondering if poor power or poor PS was causing these problems. Do you use a line conditioning UPS? I don't know about your area, but my power is pretty "dirty".

 

[Rl'Halsinor]

Well it wasn't my power supply (multimeter showed this old Antec as steady as ever), my AGP slot, or my AGP card. It wasn't my HD or CD-ROM drive. In fact, the PC is up and running and I am not qiuite sure how.

A tech friend of mine came over and we unhooked everything except the sound card and cpu. Then we put everything back. It seems the flopy controller is shot but who needs floppy today. Everything else is running fine. Computers are the devil incarnate.

And here I was all set to convince my wife we need a new build... :\

 

[Pinotage]

Have you double check that it's not the memory. Years ago I remember fixing a friend's PC that would just power up, but hang, with nothing on the monitor at all. I traced the fault to the memory not being plugged in properly. Systems don't work well without memory.

It's possible that you've got faulty memory, and that the video card is actually using that same memory to a certain extent as well. That could explain most of the faults you're having. Try looking at the memory.

Hope that helps.

Pinotage

 

[wenoc]

A multimeter might not neccesarily give you any useful information. The powersupply might work well under a light load but under slightly more stress the voltage might drop. I had that problem on one computer some years ago.

If you've tried the voltages with everything connected and powered on, and it still checks out though I guess you're in the clear. I assumed you've measured it all by itself.

That computer of mine was fubared and slightly in the same way as yours. It was a mix of fried motherboard and powersupply in the end. Powering it on wasn't reliable, sometimes you had to disconnect the powercord from the supply to "reset" it and get it to power on again. Apparently there was some thingy with the ATX-thingy in the motherboard which wasn't sure if it was on or not. In the very end it refused to power on at all if you had too many devices connected. Just because I wanted to, I switched in the harddrives two seconds after the mobo, and that way it started perfectly, which would indicate that it needs more power in the very start and couldn't handle the stress. For the record, the supply should have handled at least twice the amount of power output compared to that system.
The whole avalanche of increased faultiness started from a faulty Palmpilot USB cradle that was not connected to ground properly (they replaced all those cradles later) and caused serious static when the palm was inserted into the cradle. It fried the USB controller immediately.
Oh well, sorry for the wall of text.

 

[Rl'Halsinor]

^ Some good points there.

The system continues to run stable. I think not only cleaning the register of old Nero drivers has helped but I was running this old system in a master-slave CD-ROM configuration and a HD master -slave configuration as well that I did away with. I went to one HD and one CD-ROM.

But if I do shut it down and restart the next morning I get the BIOS screen that says there was an internal frequency error with the cpu and I have to manually set it to the correct frequency. So I let it run.

With the floppy control not working (though I don't have another cable to see if it was my connection) I am watching to see if anymore connections/components fail.