Diagnosing Bad Motherboard 1

[goombawaho]

I've got an HP Pavilion a4316f with a Pegatron M2N78-LA motherboard, 6GB RAM and WD 1TB drive. I can't seem to figure out what's going on with it. With hard drive and optical drive connected, it doesn't seem to be behave the same way if I restart it 5 times in a row. Sometimes it hangs at the "press ESC for boot device / press F10 for setup" screen but it won't go past that. Then, sometimes it does, but doesn't boot into Win 7.

So, right now, I have the hard drive disconnected and I'm running MEMTEST86+ from UBCD to test the RAM.
Next I'll attach the hard drive to a different computer and test it with Data Lifeguard Diagnostics
I'll also test the power supply but it's one of the cheaper testers (no load).
Finally, I was going to run one of the CPU tests from the UBCD.

I'll post back with results, but is there any better test that can check the general health of a motherboard better?

 

[edfair]

Do you get post error beeps? Or maybe the OK? A post diaplay card might help.

Sounds like a bios set of issues.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[rclarke250]

Flaky SATA cable? As for testing the motherboard, not much. I like to torture test it, so prime 95 if you have it, or download it here. It's free, and hammers the system pretty good. Work gives us a copy of Eurosofts PC-Check, but it's expensive, and is overkill for 95% of the jobs out there.

 

[xit]

Is there a bios update available for that board?

 

[goombawaho]

FLAKY is the operative word here. It's not consistent. When it goes into BIOS setup, everything is fine looking. I've pulled the battery and then reset all BIOS settings, but it's still flaky.

Memory passed the test. HDD passed the SMART & Extended tests. So, I'm suspicious of the optical drive, SATA cables or motherboard.

I'll check for BIOS update and I guess I'll swap out both sata cables. That's pretty simple.

 

[goombawaho]

It actually booted once and I updated the BIOS. But still the flakiness even with the optical drive disconnected and with new cables for the hard drive and optical drive.

I guess the mobo is just flaked out in some way.

 

[edfair]

Got to assume you've looked at the caps. Is there PATA connection available and do you have a bootable drive available?

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[goombawaho]

I've never seen a bad cap personally other than in a picture, but they look "normal". No PATA on the mobo. What were you thinking if I did? Trying a PATA hard drive?

 

[edfair]

Some m/bs have mixed drive access, sata hard drive and pata opticals. In order to clone stuff I've sometimes used the pata as the intermediate transfer location. They will boot off the secondary.

Your description of symptoms is classic caps. Either M/B or PS. I've discarded my share of M/Bs rather than do a cap replacement. But that was enabled by the availability of replacement boards.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[SkipCox]

I'm replacing 4 caps on the same motherboard from an a6720y as we speak. These things have a long history of bad caps and a working motherboard commands premium prices.

This thing would boot into BIOS but go no further. It would also not boot any live CD. All diagnostic testing passed with no errors and the hdd was perfectly accessible to my main machine.

I hope to bench test my repairs this afternoon or tomorrow. It's a crap shoot at best but worth 10 bucks for a bag of Rubycon caps to attempt to save the board.

Skip

 

[goombawaho]

I'm shooting the old horse.

 

[SkipCox]

The 4 caps (6.3v 820µF) I replaced on the M2N78-LA did the trick. So now that hunk of crap could work for 2 minutes or 2 years provided I don't screw up putting it back together. I have as much faith in this machine as the reappearance of 75¢ gas...

Skip

 

[edfair]

In the days of heavy component repair I expected an additional year of service of anything I did. Now that most everything is no longer economically repairable I miss those days.

It generally wasn't economical even then but the job satisfaction made up for it.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[SkipCox]

Yeah, but not much job satisfaction in repairing junk.

Figure the machine will be lucky to make the 300 mile ride back to San Diego.

Skip

 

[ceh4702]

Intermittent problems can be caused by a few things. In days gone by we would always assume it was the power supply. Often OEM's would sized the power supply so it had barely enough capacity to get the job done to save money. Sometimes the power supply becomes unstable and can cause all kinds of errors.

Another issue is often Bad RAM. If you haves some extra RAM, you could swap it out and try a different stick of DDR?.

Then sometimes lately we get bad hard drives. In the last 2 years we have seen this a lot.

Often a bad power supply will damage files or also cause RAM issues so that is one reason to check that first.

 

[goombawaho]

You're a little late to the party ceh4702. I've already done everything possible to test components and/or swap them out and it has been declared dead already then buried.