Tuesday 2 June 2009

A First – Intel E6850 Fried

The system stopped dead in its tracks. Nothing along the lines of standard troubleshooting brought it back to life.

  • Pull the A/C from the PSU and pull the BIOS battery leaving it sit for 15 minutes.
  • Change the PSU (Power Supply)
  • Pull all add-in cards.

Nothing worked.

So, we RMAd the motherboard since that would be the next most common component to fail.

The replacement came, we swapped the boards and the system did indeed power up.

We flashed the BIOS with the most current version and set the RAID to enabled since the system has two 300GB drives in a RAID 1 array via the onboard Intel controller

One of the more puzzling things to see when the system came to Windows Vista’s “I didn’t shutdown properly” black screen with boot options was watching each letter take about 3-5 seconds for each letter to be placed on the screen.

That was pretty bizarre.

We reset the BIOS settings to factory defaults just in case something we set in there was not being liked.

Windows Vista did indeed begin to boot only to have the system shut itself off.

When we powered it up again there was an error message on a single line stating that the system was shutdown previously due to a CPU thermal event.

The system refused to boot from there.

In all of my years of working in this industry, this is probably the first time I have ever seen a CPU failure.

A replacement CPU is on the way and hopefully the replacement motherboard in the system did not get taken out in the process.

We will find out tomorrow when the CPU arrives.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

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