[Tekk]

Well Im actually at work right now and I have a customers computer here. Its been acting up (crashes here and there and doesn't even come on when you push the power button..well it sounds like it is on but the HDD light stays on and there isn't anything on the screen..it just stays black). Anyway, I had a similar "not starting" problem and it was fixed by switching the power-supply. I tried a good PS that we have here in the shop and it didn't fix the problem. I took out the sticks of RAM and swapped with some others, still no good. I tried unhooking EVERYTHING except the A: and the HDD and the vid. Still startup errors. Actually, I managed to boot off the 98 startup disk and tried to fdisk the HDD (customer wanted Win2k) but when the "Do you want to enable large disk support...." screen came up and I pressed enter to accept, it immediately went back to the command prompt. So continued the troubleshooting of the startup errors. I actually swapped HDDs for a different one which was a 20GB and it showed up in the BIOS but it only showed up as a 8GB. I updated the BIOS (its a supermicro P6SBA) and still nothing.

I also want to mention that the AmiBIOS that the motherboard had kept crashing when I was in it. I could access the mobo (when it actually started correctly) but after about 30 seconds it would just halt/freeze.

After all that testing of the different components and such I just decided that the motherboard is to blame. Unfortunately that is the one piece of hardware we dont have right now in the shop. But is there something that I might be missing? There never seems to be a definitive test that will tell you "HEY! Your mobo is broken!"

The Computer is a P3 500 w/ a SuperMicro P6SBA mobo. 2 128MB of Corsair PC100 RAM. A WD 20GB HDD. An HP CDRW and a Viper v770 32mb graphics card.

Just wanted to know if you guys think my method of testing is deep enough or if there are other things that anyone likes to do when troubleshooting their computer. thanks!!!