Dead mobo?

Need some advice from the pros here.

It is a HP Pavillon a000? Odd model number, it is a socket A board with an AMD XP3000, 2x512 RAM, and it had a complaint of being slow. And slow it was. I took it to the house, and the hard drive failed the SMART during the boot. Got another drive, the Win XP disk does not see it, BIOS does not see it (SATA drive, hooked up to one of the SATA ports. no RAID) I tried an old IDE drive, no luck in BIOS or Win XP disk. I tried both of the drives on another computer, they work just fine.

So now I am thinking the mobo is toast. PSU reads fine via multi meter, so is it the mobo?

And Ubuntu cannot seem to 'see' the hard drives either. Cables and drives work great on another 'puter.

RIP for the mobo?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. The guy that ownes this computer ownes the shop that works on my elderly truck for super cheap.

Thanks.

E

 

I would say that the mobo is most likely DOA. But I have seen PSUs read OK on voltmeters and PSU testers but still not run a PC correctly. It could also be something like a bad CMOS battery or even a bad floppy drive. I've seen bad floppy drives do all kinds strange things to a PC. It most likely isn't RAM or the CPU, but those are also possibilities. It could also be a bad PCI card like a modem or NIC. Again, not likely, but possible. Pull all cards and the floppy drive, swap the RAM and CPU if possible, and hook up a known good PSU. On the other hand, all this may be a waste of time, because it probably is the motherboard.
Good luck.

(yeah, I know, not great advice, but I'm tired and drinking coffee for dinner....)

 

Thanks for the info dlb. I tried it this morning without the PCI cards and with the floppy unplugged, the hard drive never spins up. Looks like RIP for this old socket A. I don't feel like pulling a PSU out of one of my computers to try, this one seems to test ok. Dead 'puter... :cry

E

 

Yup.... mobo is dead... 99% chance that the PSU is fine.... I kind of figured it was a socket A. I've been seeing ALOT of dead socket A mobos in recent weeks, mainly in HP and Emachine computers. Maybe they're hitting their 'end-of-life' cycle about now.