Mobo hangs, what else to look at?

[berniedd]

Help me out, guys. Desktop computer with ECS mobo model GF7050VT-M5 with 3 GHz Pentium procie was brought to me. No signs of life. All parts on the mobo look good, and there are no bloated capacitors there. But I see a bloated capacitor in the power supply, so I change it with a fresh PSU. I changed the CMOS battery, and also reset the CMOS, and now the thing boots. I hear the short "OK" beep from the internal speaker. However, the process hangs after it shows the USB Controllers have been initialized and that RAM is good. I don't get the message "Failed to load the Operating System, Press any key to try again" or words to that effect if I have disconnected the hard drive (which I always used to get in all other systems I've looked at with no or corrupted hard drive). I can't get past this point, and the keyboard is frozen so I can't enter the BIOS. I tried a PS/2 and a USB keyboard, didn't help a thing.

I've also taken voltage readings off the PSU supply lines and everything's within spec.

Any suggestions?

[momaka]

Re: Mobo hangs, what else to look at?

Google images show me that there are a lot of electrolytic capacitors on this motherboard. Can you post what brand and series they are? Capacitors do not have to be bloated to be bad. I just revived an old P4 ECS motherboard last month by replacing some "perfectly fine-looking" G-Luxon caps around the CPU.

[Gariarto]

Re: Mobo hangs, what else to look at?

Check for any bent and shorted pins in connector sockets such as USB etc. Inside and out.
Re-seat plugged in components
Try it with different input devices.
Check for faulty RAM. Try it with known good RAM.
If you can, try getting into the BIOS settings and see what things are set to. Load setup defaults and try again. Also, if you can, try with a bootable CD and see if it runs it. That would suggest a hard drive problem. Try accessing the HD in another PC to verify its OK.

I once wasted half an hour trying to find out why a customer's PC wouldn't power on until I found the little 'push to make' switch had fallen out of the back of the button in the plastic case-front ! (I found THAT by shorting the 'start pins' on the motherboard and it fired up)

Good luck !