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AVForums Super Veteran
A while back I decommissioned an ASUS P5E64 WS Professional motherboard I was perfectly happy with on the basis it out of the blue stopped working. Powering it up would result in some LEDs on the board lighting up, a short spin of the fans and then the whole shooting match would fall over and the cycle would repeat, never firing up or even beginning to POST. I'd opened the case and reseated the RAM and video card (usually does the trick...but not this time) and found the area around the CPU fan and heatsink to be caked in layers of dust, so figured that something had blown or wasn't making contact. Looking at the board I couldn't see any swollen or otherwise damaged components. In any event, as I'm stubborn I stripped the mobo, took it and the fan/heatsink to a garage and proceeded to blow off 10 years of dust hoping it would make a difference. Needing to test some 6TB hard drives and having a hardware raid controller and about 20TB of hardware based arrays that won't work in my newer PC I reassembled the PC yesterday hoping the cleanup would have done the trick. Assembled on a piece of wood, fired it up and ... same result as before. :walled: Now to my line of thinking PCs (especially Asus boards) don't just die...there had to be something else going on. I decided to remove the CMOS battery ... and lo and behold if the machine didn't fire up, POST and report its CMOS settings as lost. Attached a 6TB drive and left it running overnight doing the manufacturer diagnostic before putting the drive in play to consolidate and migrate away from the hardware RAID arrays. :wallbreak:
Moral of the story...remember to check the simple stuff.
Moral of the story...remember to check the simple stuff.
