| From: Peter King via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | The motherboard on the failing system is a non-UEFI Asus P6T. The CPU is an | Intel i7 950. I have 32GB of Crucial DDR3 RAM in it. The whole thing dates | from 2009/2010 or so. I'm pretty sure I replaced the motherboard at least | once already. There are four or five spinning disks of various sizes and | ages. Wow, that's an old processor. Introduced in second quarter of 2009. Intel says that the max RAM is 24 G. The MB has 6 sockets -- an oddity of that generation of Core processors. <https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/37150/intel-core-i7-950-processor-8m-cache-3-06-ghz-4-80-gt-s-intel-qpi.html> <https://www.asus.com/us/supportonly/p6t/helpdesk_manual/> This processor uses a lot of power: 130 W TDP. Its fans probably make a significant noise. | A few minor updates. | | First, the problem remains the same: I never get through the POST, much less | to the BIOS. No beep codes (or beeps at all), no display, no nothing; it just | remains silent as the fans spin. | | Second, there seems to be power to the computer. The internal MB power | indicator lights up, the fans spin up, the hard drives seem to all spin up, | and the graphics card at least lights up. I wonder if one of the power supply "rails" is bust. The power supply supplies several different voltages, all on different rails. Sometimes a heavily-used voltage is supplied on more than one rail. One place that old systems deteriorate is in the connectors. Unplugging and plugging things in a few times can clean the contacts and sometime get them working again. I have a power supply tester. Who knows it it is useful? Something like this (not a recommendation for this listing): <https://vi.aliexpress.com/item/1005001359834960.html> They are fairly inexpensive. You could borrow mine if you were willing to pick it up and drop it off. Oh: and I have to check if I can find it. I'm near Yonge and York mills. Alternatively you could check with a voltmeter (not as easy as you'd think). | (Where "giving up" means looking for another computer I can migrate | all/most/some of the existing hardware to -- maybe an old tower that has room | for lots of spinning drives.) How many spinning drives? The more you have, the fewer systems are available. Other than that, there are a million surplus systems that are cheap and faster than yours. You might find too few SATA ports on a new MB. The current trend is to put lots of drives in a NAS. Some you can run as a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks). That might be a good long-term strategy. Too bad they are so expensive. We have a USB dock for bare SATA drives. That's OK (not great) for accessing the half dozen or so hard drives with TV programs recorded by MythTV (recording stopped about 6 years ago).