To be brutally honest, good luck.

There are thousands of things to go completely wrong on a motherboard to have an almost infinite set of symptoms.

There are of course ideas on how to try some stuff.

First, if easily done, I would try a different/new CPU, but if you don't have one on hand, don't stress it. Incidentally you could also do the reverse and test the CPU on a known good board.

If this fails just give the board a really good look over. Clean everything that is dusty and look hard for anything that looks off. This can include fried traces, bulging caps, shot ICs. Even pay special attention to small surface mount components as just one of them could cause this. Identify any fuses on the mainboard and test them with a meter.

If this fails, then understand that repairing this board could cost more, or may have already cost more time than it would be worth. (Check for odd jobs and see if it takes less time to work to buy another one, and use that as a meter of time worth). Even if the board costs 100 USD, it would still be better to work for 10 hours than to spend 20 hours repairing the board.

This is a great point that Ben Heck came up with when he tried to reverse engineer an LCD picture frame with little success. It's not worth spending more time fixing or working on a project than the amount of time it would take just to pay for it straight up.

Life lessons over, after this point I suggest you find someone else that knows more than you directly. Find a good computer repair shop (I mean a shop with full decked out diagnosis and repair equipment, not just some moron in a shed that will tell you exactly what I am) and just say, fix it bugger the cost. That would be IMO the only other thing you could do.

To prevent this, use a UPS. Not only will it prevent data loss/corruption by sudden power off, the surge protectors tend to be a big more robust in them (Some even have fuses). Get a good one from a proper brand like APC, TrippLite, GE, or maybe CyberPower (My dad has one, I guess it worked for him)

I personally don't use a UPS because my power grid rarely fails extravagantly (Around 2.5 major power outages in the last 8 years, none of which any equipment was harmed) and my current UPS is A. On the wonk, and B. unable to power my modern gaming PC. But for a lower power retro build, it should be fine.

Try to get the BIOS of your board reflashed, if possible use another flash chip. Had a MSI socket A board laying around here for years that didn't post after lighning struck (the PSU totally failed), a BIOS flash fixed the issue when I desided to try it out one or two years ago (used another board to hotflash it).

Ampera wrote:

To be brutally honest, good luck. […]
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To be brutally honest, good luck.

There are thousands of things to go completely wrong on a motherboard to have an almost infinite set of symptoms.

There are of course ideas on how to try some stuff.

First, if easily done, I would try a different/new CPU, but if you don't have one on hand, don't stress it. Incidentally you could also do the reverse and test the CPU on a known good board.

If this fails just give the board a really good look over. Clean everything that is dusty and look hard for anything that looks off. This can include fried traces, bulging caps, shot ICs. Even pay special attention to small surface mount components as just one of them could cause this. Identify any fuses on the mainboard and test them with a meter.

If this fails, then understand that repairing this board could cost more, or may have already cost more time than it would be worth. (Check for odd jobs and see if it takes less time to work to buy another one, and use that as a meter of time worth). Even if the board costs 100 USD, it would still be better to work for 10 hours than to spend 20 hours repairing the board.

This is a great point that Ben Heck came up with when he tried to reverse engineer an LCD picture frame with little success. It's not worth spending more time fixing or working on a project than the amount of time it would take just to pay for it straight up.

Life lessons over, after this point I suggest you find someone else that knows more than you directly. Find a good computer repair shop (I mean a shop with full decked out diagnosis and repair equipment, not just some moron in a shed that will tell you exactly what I am) and just say, fix it bugger the cost. That would be IMO the only other thing you could do.

To prevent this, use a UPS. Not only will it prevent data loss/corruption by sudden power off, the surge protectors tend to be a big more robust in them (Some even have fuses). Get a good one from a proper brand like APC, TrippLite, GE, or maybe CyberPower (My dad has one, I guess it worked for him)

I personally don't use a UPS because my power grid rarely fails extravagantly (Around 2.5 major power outages in the last 8 years, none of which any equipment was harmed) and my current UPS is A. On the wonk, and B. unable to power my modern gaming PC. But for a lower power retro build, it should be fine.

Oh, I definitely learned my lesson re: skimping on surge protection, particularly since my area is very prone to power outages. I do have another compatible CPU hanging around and another compatible board, but they're used and not known good - I will try that anyway. Thanks for the advice, if I can't fix it I'll just get another board and/or CPU, don't think it's worth spending money on. Also - San Marino, very nice. 😊

Kamerat wrote:

Try to get the BIOS of your board reflashed, if possible use another flash chip. Had a MSI socket A board laying around here for years that didn't post after lighning struck (the PSU totally failed), a BIOS flash fixed the issue when I desided to try it out one or two years ago (used another board to hotflash it).

To do this would I need another board with the same chipset?

No, you just need a board that can write to the EEPROM.

.fantasista. wrote:

To do this would I need another board with the same chipset?

No, but be sure that the boards uses the same voltage on the flash chip. Use flashrom, it don't cares about flashing BIOS in wrong motherboard.
Here's my post about the hotflash of the MSI board.