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I killed my Asus P5Q!

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TTimmy

Member
Joined
Feb 1, 2008
Location
Davao City Philippines
A little back story first, I recently replaced my GAP35-S3L with a brand new Asus P45based P5Q because my old motherboard would not show video during and after POST, it has been a MAJOR irritation since I first got the board last december, but this behavior was erratic and it comes and it goes so i put up with it until finally it would no longer POST with video.

So now I have my new P5Q, I've been using it for 2 weeks now and everything is going fine and dandy, it overclocks like a dream and gets me to 3.6GHz on my E7200 with less volts than my old P35. So earlier today, I was tweaking my ram timings and after saving my settings and rebooting, the USB storage device detection was taking longer than the 5 seconds i'm used to, so i unplugged my WDC 1terrabyte USB drive while it was being detected, then BAM, my whole system shuts down and restarts, but now there is NO video, all the fans still run, I can hear the click of the HD just before it loads WinXP, but NO video!

Now, I've tried Clearing CMOS with battery out and jumper pin on CRTC(clear real time clock), replaced my Videocard with a lower-end 8600GT, tested my 8800GT on another system and its fine, replaced my ram with 1.8v stock rated Corsairs, tested my RAM on my other PC and its finem removed PSU and tried another one from a running PC, removed all extraneous accessories , I've also removed the actual mobo from the case and reinstalled everything one by one but ALAS still no video at all.

My question is, did my removal of the WDC USB drive during boot could have caused this catastrophic failure? Any thoughts? :bang head


P.S. My battery is quite warm to the touch after a few minutes/ just noticed this because i had to remoove it a couple of timees while troubleshooting. Is this normal?
 
Well, it wasn't a good idea to unplug electrical components while it's being utilized/detected. The answer is yes, the removal of the USB device during the boot-up did indeed killed the board.

One time I did the same thing except it was an internal HDD. The mobo just shut itself down and failed to boot back up. It did show power via LED on the board, but that was it.

The cmos battery could be warm because of the motherboard's temp. Usuially the whole motherboard would be warm which is normal.

Looks like it's RMA time.
 
@Nebulous

Whooo, maybe I could have waited a couple of secooonds more before I removed that USB plug....:bang head But I have done it a couple of times in the past with my old Mobo, Could it have contributed to its untimely death?:confused:

@ghost_recon88

Yep, the Standby LED still works, I think the USB ports are dead though, my G15 and mouse wont light up even after a few minutes leaving the whole thing on.


RMAAAAAAAAA WHERE ART THOU..............

RMA in my country is a hit or miss affair, i hope i get one. :bang head
 
Well usually you would want to wait till the PC is off before you unplug anything from it. You can, however, plug a USB device IN while the PC is on. Then windows will do it's thing: "Found new hardware, blah blah"

I'm afraid that board is toast. Nothing you can do now but RMA/Replace it.

Good Luck, I hope you do get an RMA/Replacement.
 
USB by it's very nature is designed to be removable; I can't see how simply unplugging a USB cable could cause this type of catastrophic failure.

On the other hand there is the possibility of grounding issues with USB. You can run into some weird issues especially if the electrical wiring in your house isn't properly grounded, and you proceed to plug your computer and your external device into outlets with different ground potentials. The only path it would then have to equalize the difference between the two grounds would be over the USB cable, and I suppose that could probably fry something.
 
A little update on my misadventure,

So i went back to the store where I got the P5Q from and asked for an RMA, the store owner was real nice guy and directly replaced the defective board with another brandnew P5Q, and I was like w00t!! So I thanked the guy and quickly rushed home to hook up everything and check it out. Now I have my CPU, CPU Cooler, RAM, VC, power switch/LED light/Power LED/reset switch/speaker on the Q-Connector, PSU and one hard drive attached to the mobo which is sitting right now on the box it came with.

So the moment of truth, I press the power button, the mobo does the start. restart thing that it does and the CPU fan goes to full blast, no error codes and still NO VIDEO! Whhhaaaatttt??? Now, I have 3 types of RAM with me this time and I start switching them out one by one, and KA POW! I have video! I could then got to desktop and see everrything, so I turned off the PC to and tried installing another RAM stick for dual channel then turned it on, NOTHING AAGAIN!! So I remove both sticks of Corsair DDll800C5 and try my TX1066 on a different slot, now it does video again! WTF? I turn the whole thing off and again try to go dual channel on the black slots and guess what? NO VIDEO again! I try to run single channel now it wont do video, different ram again no video, all slots tried no video!:bang head:bang head:bang head:bang head:bang head:bang head I am now currently out of Ideas.... Please Help.....:confused:



P.S. I Had 2 PSUs, 2 Video Cards, and 3 sets of RAM that I used to trouble shoot. All are confirmed working on other systems.
 
clear cmos by pulling battery and setting ctr jumper on 2/3 for ten min.ns or so put jumper back on 1/2 put battery bad put in one stick of ram in go to bios set ram voltage per manufactor spec set fsb strap to 333 set ram to slowest speed 667 or so hope this work.s for ya
Rich
 
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