Urgent Request - Flashing Diag LED and NO boot???

[IncredibleHat]

Yesterday I was using my computer fine... like normal, playing a simple game, then quitting for the night. Shutting down like normal.

 

This morning I wake up... to a dead machine. !!!!!????

 

I take the power cord out, let it sit for a few minutes. Put it back in... nothing.

 

I open up the case and take a look, and the LED6 (by the dimms) and the Diagnostic LED 1 (down by the last pci slot), are 'blinking'. ? I have NEVER seen that before!

 

What does this mean??? Please... help... I can't get this machine to even beep, bootup, or do anything but sit blinking. I don't understand what could have happened in 8 hours of idle that could do this!

 

I also pulled the cmos jumper, and battery... didn't help :(

[red930]

So what have you done so far? Only disconnect the power plug from the PSU? Have you tried CMOS CLEAR? How long have you had this system running? Did you connect all four power plugs into the motherboard (24pin, 4pin [12v], 4pin floppy, and 4pin molex)? What about taking one of your memory modules out to see if it boots with just one? If not take that one out and put the other one and see if it would boot? Post results, thank you.

[lowboy]

Do a longer cmos clear exactly as posted here:http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showpost.p...04&postcount=24

[IncredibleHat]

I take the power cord out, let it sit for a few minutes. Put it back in... nothing.

I also pulled the cmos jumper, and battery... didn't help

 

(my PSU has a power switch on it, btw)

 

I tried yanking a stick. The lights were solid on poweron.

So I shut off power.

I tried the other stick just by itself. The lights were solid.

So I shut off power again.

I put both back in, turn on power, and the lights start blinking again.

...

So, I take out the one I took out first, turn on power, and blinking lights.

Grrr

So, I swap the two, poweron, blinking lights.

WTF?!

So, I take both out, poweron, and lights are solid! BAH!

But of course it wont boot that way!

...

So I stick one in the yellow slot on the top (4). Lights are solid!

So this time I boot with that. I get to bios, save and restart, and the machine beeps loudly, then slowly posts, but missing characters here and there. I try to get to bios, but it wont.

Fart.

So, I clear CMOS once again. Poweron, BLINKING LIGHTS !%@#

Ok... thats it.

I go grab some old cheapy kingmax ram (512mb). Stick them in.

BLINKING FARGEN LIGHTS!

I take one out, and stick it in slot 1. Solid lights.

...

At this point I give up.

 

Is it my ram ? (ALL OF THEM)... or is the motherboard hosed? Or is it something else? And wtf ... this machine had been running rock solid for 5 months.

 

Everything is plugged in correctly.

The machine is about 5 months old.

Used sparingly as a game machine.

Never runs 24/7, shutdown after each use, not used every day.

All software up to date (god I'm sick of people asking if all my drivers are up to date).

I'm not a novice user who simply got his hands on a DFI. If that helps the tone of anyone who wishes to help.

 

We may have had a 'brown out' last night... because my speaker system was powered down. YET my Mac was still running fine (which is always on 24/7 because osx has a great sleep function).

 

Anymore ideas?

[lowboy]

Do The Long Clear As Posted Above.

[IncredibleHat]

Before I posted, I had the battery, power, jumper out for a half hour.

 

I have no PS2 keyboard.... and how is a keyboard going to help things if I cannot even get the machine to pass just getting power to it ? I cannot even REACH getting to a boot point to be holding some key down on a keyboard... grrr.

[red930]

The LONG CLEAR CMOS is a conspiracy, don't listen to him!! So did you try all the memory dimms (slots) or just one yellow slot and both orange? Your Dual Channel memory dimms might be toast, did you have the memory overclocked for the 5 months you've had them? Did you have the four power plugs connected from the very start (5 months ago)?

 

@Lowboy

[IncredibleHat]

Found a couple slightly related issue threads... neither have any solutions that appear to help.

 

http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=39650

http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15618

 

(yes turns out its LED1, amber, not the first red LED of the diagnostic bank)

 

Man this is crazy... I did a much longer dead sit. Put one stick in top orange slot, turned on power... got a steady light. So I booted to BIOS, set to optimized defaults, restarted. Seemed fine so far, so I set more settings in BIOS (I use RAID, so I need that ENABLED to boot to windows), restarted to windows. Windows gripes about wanting nvata.sys from SRCDATA. Guh, so I reinstall nforce drivers, and reboot. That goes away.

 

Ok. So I have windows up. But running seriously hindered with just 1gb ram. Dare I shut down to put that in?

 

So, shut down... before putting in the stick of ram, I turn the power off for a minute, then back on (not touching a single thing or cord). BLINKING DAMNED LIGHT!

 

I didnt even tough anything... gads. I'm really getting frustrated now. I MM the battery, solid 2.99V, I MM the input power, and its solid on 12v and 5v and 3v rails.

 

I'm running out of ideas. :confused:

[lowboy]

What psu? You need to update sig with psu.

[IncredibleHat]

Welp (hate responding to myself ... but oh well), I tried one last idea. One that goes against every fiber of my being, but since I figure this rig is toast, I can't hurt it further...

 

When I take out all ram, it wont blink when I give it juice. So, I test the lines a bit more with the MM, and the purple line (board standby power), it is a rock solid 5.12v. Now, I turn off the power, and stick any ram into the top orange slot. I give it power, and its blinking.

 

I probe it again, all lines are ok EXCEPT the purple wire. Its jumping like MADD all over the place from .1 to 4.0.

 

Thats jacked, no ?

 

So... the thing I did that goes against my better judgement... I shut off power. Took out the ram. Turned on power, got the steady amber leds. NOW I stuffed the ram into the slots. *ahem* ... I don't suggest this to anyone btw... thats my disclaimer.

 

After doing that, the LEDs were still solid. The purple line was still solid 5v. So, I hit the power button, and wammy... its booting up perfectly fine. Went to bios, cleared settings, manually reset them all, deleted out all cmos reloaded. Saved a new slot. Restarted.

 

Its now running through Memtest for a bit, to see if I damaged (or if they were already) the RAM.

 

Crazy thing.

It looks like now, if I ever lose power to the machine, I will never be able to boot up again. That is just WRONG.... and why it has all of a sudden decided to do this ?! I dont know! Everything by the book suggests nothing should be wrong with this thing. But for some reason, its crappin out. I've never had a machine only last 5 months.

[Sifu]

Wow. Your initial problem sounds exactly like what happened to me. One morning, I went to turn on my system, and it was dead. Blinking LED. I figured it was the PSU, so I replaced it. No more blinking LED - but this time, all four red Debug LEDs flashed once and nothing happened. Taking out the gfx card allowed the system to get into the boot up process, but of course it couldn't actually finish because it had no video card. I RMA'd my video card, and have tried the new one in both slots. Still the four Debugs flash - but I'm not getting the blinker anymore.

 

It's not the PSU. It's not the video card. I highly doubt it's my premium RAM. Like you, my system has been up for about 5 months. My usage pattern is also similar to yours. I am thinking it is a problem with the MOBO - something, somewhere, just fried - or something like that. At this point, I am about the send my MOBO back, but I would love some other solution. I have already been without a system for over a month.

[Sifu]

BTW, I was also using a Seasonic (the 500) as a PSU, and am now using an Enermax noisetaker. That took care of the whole blinking LED thing. It may be possible that the Seasonic did something to the MOBO?