VOGONS

Help! Micronics/Gateway 2000 486 Motherboard Mysteriously Dies!

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First post, by bostonvintage1993

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Hi all!

As the VOGONS community has been so helpful to me in the past, I thought I'd share this issue I'm having with this motherboard pictured. It's a nice Gateway 486 JX30G 09-00189 motherboard. It was working just fine a couple hours ago, then I took a break for lunch and I come back to this beep code and no more video! I'm very confused as to what changed from the 40 minutes I spent away from the motherboard, and I can't seem to pinpoint the problem. I looked up beep codes for the Phoenix A486 BIOS, but couldn't seem to match any codes with my beeps. I attached the beeps as an audio file here as well. I don't understand how the motherboard just stopped working, and as of now my system is dead. I even stuck a post card in there to see what it said, and it came back with "02 --". How can I fix this problem and restore my board?

Thank you all so much in advance for any help you can provide!

Have any questions related to Gateway 2000? I'm here to help - send a PM!

Reply 1 of 2, by Horun

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Probably bad caps, and being SMT that makes it harder to figure out which ones. Are you sure the PSU is also not failing ?
added: did the batteries die ? I see it uses an external battery and may not boot up if they are dead....

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 2 of 2, by bostonvintage1993

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Horun wrote on 2023-02-04, 03:36:

Probably bad caps, and being SMT that makes it harder to figure out which ones. Are you sure the PSU is also not failing ?
added: did the batteries die ? I see it uses an external battery and may not boot up if they are dead....

Hi,

So sorry, just seeing this now! Thank you for your kind reply! I actually ended up spending weeks trying to revive this board back in February and it got to a point where it just wasn't worth the effort anymore. However, I was able to find a replacement motherboard, so everything worked out in the end. Thank you again!

Have any questions related to Gateway 2000? I'm here to help - send a PM!

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