Will Recovering a OS Harm a Motherboard?

Sorry, I forgot the most important thing:

Motherboard is marked MS-7207 Ver. 1.0, which I think is a MSI board.

Logan

Doggone Logan! I avidly re-opened this thread because I thought someone had answered your question (I'm intrigued too).

Yahlasit

I think that the Motherboard is actually a K8NGM2-NBP from SI. If true, they have had an update to the mainboard BIOS to take it to 1.1 since 2006......

After you have replaced the caps and checked the heat sink and if I am right, you should update the BIOS as a next thing to do I feel.....

Hi, Andy and Bwire!

I just added an update to the end of the thread, but thought I'd insert one here, too, on account of my memory skipped a track and I forgot that you'd both been kind enough to respond to my original request for help. I appreciate that and wanted to make sure that I responded back.

I've got the board out of the case and will go over it closer this afternoon. When I originally looked at it I didn't have it under my work light and didn't see a manufacturer's name, so it's very possible that this board is not what I thought. The system's only a few years old, so hopefully it'll come up eventually and I can flash the BIOS to the most recent version. That probably needs to be done anyway, since I'm going to put a fresh battery in before making the final handoff to it's new owner for her classwork.

Bwire, say it isn't so (K8N = junk)! Please don't tell me we did all this for nothing! Do you know what the language lady will do to me if this thing croaks on her? I won't be able to run far enough! I better get an alibi ready, just in case...

Have a great holiday, guys!

Logan

Hi Logan,

My XP computer was doing the same thing. I finally looked at the heat transfer compound between the CPU and the fan heat sink. It was dry and not making good contact. I cleaned the surfaces and applied new compound - a thin coat. Now it works fine.

Now, I never run any computer without having a temp monitoring program running in the background.

I'd check this first; it's a fairly easy fix. Next, I would check all the outputs from the power supply.

Mike

Mike,

Thanks! I've got the board out so that's the first thing on my list for tonight. I'd like to get this thing running. Donating it was supposed to be my good deed for the year!

Logan

All,

Quick update: I went over the motherboard and found some capacitors (next to the CPU) were deformed (domed on top) and electrolyte had bubbled from the top, which back in the day was not good news. I've seen this before and it (back then, anyway) was attributed to some bad capacitors that had found their way onto the marketplace. Replacing them worked then, so maybe it'll work this time. Ebay had some good prices and they're on order. I'll let you know how it works when they arrive.

Hopefully this won't turn into the electronic equivalent of getting a 'free' pet from the pound?

Logan

I have encountered a similar experience with one of my older computers. It ended up that the capacitors on the motherboard needed to be replaced. If you check the electrolytic capacitors on the motherboard (there should be many of them - they are cylindrical devices that are commonly colored either green or brown and white) they could be leaking or bulging. This is an indication that they need to be replaced. In the situation of my motherboard I replaced the capacitors and the computer booted up normally once I reinstalled the operating system (it actually allowed me to do that!).

I hope that this helps.

Your capacitors are more than likely to be the fault, the fact that your power supply fan went up to full speed indicates an overheat situation due to overload [ bad caps] then auto power supply output protection and shutdown .

Hopefully when you change them out things will improve good luck.

Are you sure that this system originally had XP SP2 on it. The reason I ask is that I was reconfiguring an existing XP system some time ago and used the recovery system that was built in and got some very strange results. The system in the recovery partition and the drivers it was installing did not match the existing hardware and created several problems. After a couple of tries I looked discovered my error and formatted the drive, installed the OS I wanted with generic drivers and downloaded the real drivers from the internet. Problem solved.

Good morning, everyone,

I much appreciate the help and tips that have come my way. I've worked through every suggestion and have found the following to report back:

a-as Mike said, the heat paste was old and solidified. I cleaned it all up and laid down a fresh layer of Arctic Silver. That didn't fix the problem, but it definitely needed to be done!

b-As Guest and Garth suggested, I've pulled all the 3300 uF, 6.3V caps in that section of the board, especially the bulged ones, and am awaiting arrival of new computer-grade caps. The other caps scattered about the board don't appear to have suffered so I'm leaving them alone for now.

c-Jim, good catch! I'm pretty sure that it was SP2. The system actually ran for several hours before dying and I fortunately made notes of the configuration before it went 'away'. The previous owner found and gave me the original recovery CD, so when/if the system comes back to life I'll try that and keep an eye out for mismatched drivers as you suggested. I had been prepared to go through the driver-update dance, but hadn't thought deeper and realized the potential driver/SP conflicts. Fortunately, this particular machine hasn't been modified or upgraded from the as-sold configuration, so at least I won't have to contend with some weird, off brand hardware and drivers. Now that you mention the possibilities, I might just go ahead and sterilize the drive with Drive Scrubber so I'm assured of starting with a completely fresh drive and no possibility of 'artifacts' from previous installs. (I never completely trust the format that gets done during a recovery. Just paranoid, I guess.)

Thanks again, everyone! Here's the plan for now: 1-Replace caps and try not to screw up the motherboard traces with the soldering iron , 2-Cross fingers and flip the switch and see if anything smokes, 3-If it comes to life, do a trial recovery (from the files on the hard drive) to exercise the power supply and new caps, 4-If that all works, sterilize the drive (I'm not positive the files on the hard drive are uncorrupted), 5-Perform a CD-based recovery, 6-A day's worth of burn-in time, 7-Take the whole thing up to the language class instructor and call it a day.

Meanwhile, I'm off to Oklahoma to help install a ceiling fan in my sister's place. With my luck, that'll be a whole new thread...

Thanks again, everyone!

Logan

Howdy, all,

Well, it's not good news. The new caps arrived today and I installed them this evening and put everything back together. No change upon powerup. I'm assuming two things: 1) Bwire was correct in post #11 and 2) when the caps blew they took something else on the board with them, rendering the whole thing useless.

But, on the positive side, I did manage to budget-justify a new Weller WES51 soldering station because my old soldering iron just didn't have what it took to desolder the caps on a multilayered board.

And I learned a few things, too.

Plus I've still got that 512 M of RAM on two sticks...

Thanks for y'all's suggestions and tips, I appreciate the help but I think it's time to put this one in the round file (which Bwire suggested last week when this whole debacle started).

Y'all have a great weekend!

Logan

You can replace the mobo for about $10 if you look for it...

Something about this thread doesn't sit right. Logan, you said that you get to about 41% of the recovery when it hangs up? Still the same now?

Since you were running all sorts of apps before you tried recovery, the MOBO was "okay" then. Are you really sure the caps failed at that time? They could have been bad already and the system running okay but marginally.

If replacing the caps and renewing the thermal compound didn't change the operation, I wouldn't suspect the MOBO as much as something about the recovery package. When you got to that point, the CPU went into something that loaded it pretty heavily (you mentioned CPU fan went full speed - not PS fan as Garth said), and just crashed there. Has the recovery disk or partition been used before? I'd rather try to reinstall XP from a clean install disk.

Hi Peter,

Yes I have mixed up my fans, That could be misleading. Usually CPU overheating would do that. However it is possible bad caps could have damaged voltage regulators which could cause CPU fan to go full speed if shorted. Does the fan default to full speed if software controlled whilst installing a new program or is it bios controlled?

Were the removed caps tested?

Hi, Peter, Garth,

After the system died the second time I tried running recovery, it hasn't even been able to make it through a boot up. Now, when I turn it on, the CPU fan goes to full speed and stays there until the power supply goes into safety shutdown. It does this on two different power supplies, one a known good one.

I checked the old caps with my Fluke VOM on the capacitor mode after pulling them out and got mixed results, which seems to indicate that at least a few of them were bad. Yet, even with all new caps, I get the same bootup results which would suggest that whatever happened also took something out on the mobo.

I'm thinking that Peter's theory sounds pretty good, that the bubbled-up caps were something that happened a while back but the system wasn't really 'pushed' until I ran the recovery routines. This agrees with the fact that the former owner just ran e-mail and other light duty, low stress apps. This also applies to the apps I ran prior to trying the recovery; they were mainly maintenance apps, run one at a time instead of all together. Maybe the recovery process, with high power consumption from the DVD, fans, etc., pushed it right over the edge.

In trying to isolate the problem I tried different hard drives (with XP pre-installed) just to see if it would boot up (drivers would be for a different mobo, so I wouldn't expect it to actually run) but got the same results, so I'm reasonably sure the motherboard's the problem area.

Almost forgot to mention that I dug out my old BIOS POST checker. I think it was made by Asus and has been laying in my kit for ages. To use it, you plug a small circuit card into an open PCI slot and power everything up. The card has two LED displays which give numerical values showing what the POST is doing at any given time. It's pretty neat, but I haven't used it in a long time and I'm not sure that the codes it shows are still relevant to more modern PCs of different manufacturer. I guess it doesn't matter for this board, though, because everything dies and there's no final POST code shown.

I tried looking for a replacement board but I'm kinda leery of trying the same one. I'm thinking more about just putting in a more modern board and finding a cheap (legal!) copy of XP to build a new system. But, this'll be a rainy day project, right now we've got two family vehicles that are needing repairs and that's a whole 'nother can o' worms.

Hi Logan,

Considering the price of mobos your time would certainly be better spent fixing the autos.

A good way to check caps for leakage is with a variable power supply, just crank up the voltage slowly and observe the charge current, if it increases significantly as you approach working voltage and possibly runs away then you have a bad cap.

Good luck.

Garth

This post is not a solution and I feel for your problem as I have had numerous PC problems in the past. I just wanted to say that I appreciate your feedback to our various suggestions/solutions. It is very rare that Original Posters (OPs) reply in the detail that you do.

Thank You!