[IT'S ALIVE!]Lost a machine.

Well, today was not my day. Around 12:30 PM the power went out at the house, so I went to check on the farm and start shutting rigs down. Most of them are in UPS'es but with them crunching they won't last long on battery. So I went ahead and powered them all down that were running on UPS and waited for the power to come back on. I swear, lately the power company has been so unreliable I think there are some third world countries with power delivery than I get. Anyways, after the power came on I started powering the farm back up and everything went well until I went to power up the E6600 cruncher in my sig. I hit the power button and the fans powered on and the green led lit on the case, but nothing else happened. Not a post beep or anything. I cycled it several times and still no beep. So I pulled it from the stack and went and jumped the clear cmos jumper, with the battery pulled. I left it like that for at least 1/2 hour, then put the battery back in and removed the jumper and went to test the system again. Again, it powered up but nothing else happened. So it looks like my Gigabyte 965P-DS3 board has packed it in.

I'm not totally in a bind with that system because I have my old P5WDH board I can use for a replacement while I RMA the Gigbyte board, but also this afternoon my office called. They had a land job starting up a week early and didn't have a hand available. So they asked me to go start the job and stay for around 3 days on it. So that cruncher will be staying down until I get back from that land job.

That terrible thing about it is that the old E6600 has been producing some outrageous RAC for a dual core system. It was running over 3700 RAC.

And that system was on a UPS and was still running when I hit the power button to power it down. And from what I could tell (monitor not on the UPS), the system powered down correctly, looking at the hard drive light flashing while it was shutting down.

So anyways, I'm kinda bumbed out about all that. There was no reason that I could tell for that board to go down like that and not even give me a post beep.

Hopefully I can sub the Asus board in without having to do a complete reintall of XP when I get back. I hate to lose all those uncrunched work units on that machine.

Wow mudd, that sucks I still don't get how power loss can kill a rig... I often catch myself by shutting computer off just by unplugging them

Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me either. And it was on a UPS too, so it's not like it got surged or anything either. I've powered down many times before by hitting the power switch, which triggers the system to power down normally. I set that option in bios with all systems that offer that setting in bios too. That way I can power down everything without having a monitor on at the time, such as for power outages like today's.

Yeah I have all my rigs set to power on after AC loss and most of them have the AC switches. Most of my running comps are folding / crunching or doing something so I leave them turned on.

This might be too far fetched but could the UPS have shot some electricity through the computer's rs232 port it was connected to or somehow fried it? I don't know a whole lot about UPS units, nor do I have one anymore but it seems possible.

Very odd that it would do that. You'd think anything on a UPS would survive a power outage or even a spike! Maybe you were getting to the end of the battery and something under-volted? The same thing happened to me with that Q6600 and Abit board. The Q6600 was plugged into an APC 1500 shared with my Opty file server. The server has the USB cable and shuts down after 3 min but the ABit just died with the UPS battery I guess - and died for good.


Good news and semi-bad news. When I swapped out the Abit board with the Gigabyte you suggested XP wanted re-registration! Kind of a pain but at least the WU's were still good. I've decided to just hang on to the ABit until I can grab another quad to go in it - I hate re-registering! You'd think the stupid OS would be smart enough to know it's the same drive and CPU. Micro$oft strikes again ...

At least Gigabyte has a 3 year warrantee on the board, so all it will cost me is shipping to them. I will file an RMA with them when I get back in from that land job early next week and get the P5WDH board installed and get that rig back crunching.

I fought this same problem a few months ago. Was simply sick about the failed mobo. So I unplugged it and ignored it for a few weeks till I could tear it down for shipping. Then thought, "Let's try one more time". I hit the bios reset (for the ump-teenth time) and it fired right up. The only difference was a long period removed from all power. Q6600 on an Abit board.

I've had some power up problems that were solved by pulling the mainboard power connector (with the power off, of course), reseating it and powering back on. Something in the P/S holds a charge. But, if you got it to power up, but no display that probabaly won't help. Might be missing a voltage in the P/S, try another one of those.

I've had this happen before, you just gotta play around a bit to get it to boot again. Try a different kind of ram.

Unfortunately I am out on a land job right now. I drove out to between Beaumont and Houston, TX to the location yesterday and I just got internet access hooked up about an hour ago and the dead machine is at the house. Hopefully they can find me a relief for Sunday so I can have some days off.

We are damn busy right now. Good for the bank account but bad for time off.

I have a Shuttle XPC that does this to me all the time. If I shut it down or lose power, it seems to be a gamble. It was a 24/7 computer for over 5 years. I have no idea why, but usually if I re-seat the memory/cards/connectors and give it a little cleaning it fires right up. Strangest thing, but it always works. I have had various PC's over the years exhibit similar behavior, but none so consistently as this Shuttle. Most of the time, its the always on, hard lived pcs that this happens to on my end...

My duals down. Had to back-off on the quad a bit too, it's baking right now in Seattle.

El<(')>Maxi said:

it's baking right now in Seattle.

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Indeed, yesterday I had to turn my PS3 off because f@h combined with the weather had the fans sounding like a whiny chipset fan. The other systems have been running toasty as well.

I had a similar problem with one of my Gigabyte boards muddocktor, the fans would come on at boot but nothing would happen. I did the same thing as you, pulled the battery and power plugs (though only for 10 mins), I also unplugged the RAM and tried booting with just one of them, and after plugging everything back in it booted up.

Sounds kinda like the fun DS3 cold boot issues. Try removing some ram, and fire it back up. Sometimes works for me.

Yeah, I'll try a little more troubleshooting this afternoon before giving up on the board. I'll strip it down to just 1 different stick of ram and a vid card and see if I can get some response from it. But, I had noticed for the last 4 months before it went down that it gave a funny sounding post beep. It was more of a 2 tone beep than a regular sounding post beep like my other 3 Gigabyte boards give. I'm thinking that maybe something on the board might have been failing and it finally gave out.

And sorry to hear about your machines giving you trouble, maxie. And yes, the temps suck around here too. The only way I can keep the farm running is due to the window unit I have installed in the computer room and electric rates are up too. My last electric bill was almost $600.

bmill said:

Sounds kinda like the fun DS3 cold boot issues. Try removing some ram, and fire it back up. Sometimes works for me.

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Damn if you didn't call that one right! I swapped the ram from some Ballistix in slots 2 and 4 to some cheap G. Skill in slot 1 and wham, post beep and into bios I went. I went ahead and dropped the other stick of G. Skill in slot 3 and went back into bios and reset the overclocking options and now have it up and running. Thanks for the suggestion about the ram. And I hadn't ever had any problems with the cold boot issues before this time.

So I have it back up and crunching again.

muddocktor said:

...My last electric bill was almost $600.

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That's why you've got to keep working all that overtime

For future reference, I have a p5wdh and the ga-p965, swapping hard drives with XP installed works fine. there are a couple drivers that need to be installed, but no BSODs.

That's good to hear, noxqzs. I've generally had good luck in the past with board swaps, but there were a few times where even a repair install didn't help. But generally, swapping between various Intel chipset boards has been painless for me.

I've got machines down too. A week after the lightning storm I lost two integrated network cards in two days, and 4 machines that won't boot into windows. I guess I need more filtering UPS units.......