First post, by JonnyGators
Does anyone around here know how to actually troubleshoot motherboard problems?
Like - more than just randomly saying on a forum "you should change some capacitors".
Not to offend anyone - but any idiot anywhere can chime in and say "might be a bad capacitor" in any discussion about any electronic fixing/troubleshooting, and quite frankly, it means absolutely nothing!
To be fair - I understand capacitors are generally terrible and often a culprit. And when restoring 50 year old equipment, or older, going through and changing all capacitors that are of older technology and will likely break down eventually, is not a bad idea.
But when dealing with 20 year old motherboards that have lots of tiny capacitors, it's not a very useful comment, and doesn't really get to the heart of a problem so much as trying to replace something and hope for the best. That's not troubleshooting - that's trying random things and hoping for the best.
So that brings me to the motherboard on the bench today: An ASUS A8N32-SLI. Was my 2nd build, bought it in March of '07, along with a Athlon 64 X2 3800+. Was my main machine until 2013. Then it was used as a secondary machine - had XP on it for a period of time to run some apps that didn't like 7. At some point it started giving me some random problems not wanting to turn on all the time, and just kicked around not doing much. Never really knew where the problems were, never really spent much time troubleshooting it. So about a year ago I decided to play around and see what it could do, and if problems came up I'd deal. And I managed to successfully build it into a open media vault media server. Had it running 24/7 for quite some time. It didn't like booting up properly, even with a new battery it usually loses BIOS settings when unplugged, and often I have to go through the setup a few times to get it to boot to the right HD - but once it booted, ran stable, never a problem hosting the terrabytes of data on the RAID 5 that was in there.
So I decided to get into VR, which required a new build, build #4. This freed up build #3 to become the new media server. Migrated the raid 5 into there, did some configuring, running great. Which is a breath of relief, because relying on a nearly 15 year old computer to host my terrabytes of data was getting scarier. So, that freed up the mobo for tinkering.
So it's back on the table, and.....getting it to boot to install media is failing hardcore! I have 2 power supplies, one that is frequently in use in another build, 2 videocards, one that is confirmed to be working in another machine, so I've ruled those out as culprits. What I find is that frequently I'll turn it on and get no video, or I'll turn it on, and at some point in the process of booting to something, it freezes. Oh - I maxed the thing out with 4 1GB sticks of ram - haven't run RAM tests on it, but the RAM has been sitting in there for years running things, right up to this past weekend when I retired it from being the media server - I figure at least 1 of the sticks has got to be good, and I've tried using only 1 stick at a time, in different slots, went through each of the sticks - so if it's a RAM issue, that would mean all 4 sticks would have to have gone bad in the same way at the same time. Unlikely. But - yeah, I could run a RAM test just to verify the sticks are all good. So that leaves me with mobo and processor.
I'm not sure if the problems trying to boot to an installer and failing are related to the past problems I remember from a few years ago, or if it is a new problem that happened to develop just now. My gut feeling is - it's a problem that effects it's ability to do specific things around startup, that's tempormental, but once something is booted into, it's past the point where the problem is and can operate fine - I would bet that if I put my OMV HD back in here, I could boot to that, and have it continue running with no problem.
Probably not worth much time - but I did want to tinker with it before boxing it up to live in a box for years until someone else throws it away, and figured - maybe this is a chance to see if anyone out there knows more about troubleshooting and zeroing in on a problem with a bad mobo, beyond just randomly saying "have you tried changing capacitors" and driving off.