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Thoughts on Motherboard Failure
July 4, 2009 |
In my last post, I alluded to the Hard Disk and Motherboard crash which took down my webserver which this blog ran on.
Not only did a year old hard drive crash, but surprisingly the motherboard (a VIA VB7001) stopped working while I was trying to figure out what happened.
I have now rebuilt the machine with an Intel ATOM Motherboard and a new hard disk and it is now functioning as my database server instead of my web server.
However, I now have a suspicion of what caused the motherboard to crash. It basically failed when I tried to boot a BARTPE CD via an external DVD Reader that took its power from the computer rather than a direct power source. I had previusly used the external drive with my small laptop with no problems, but I had never used it with a Mini-ITX board.
That was probably a bad idea!
The VB7001 motherboard worked OK, it just failed to boot because the Hard Disk had failed. Once I plugged in the external drive however to try and boot BARTPE then nothing at all happened. There were no messages on the screen, no RAM check - nothing!
So, the moral of the story is ….
Be very very wary about plugging in USB devices that take their power from the motherboard into a Mini-ITX motherboard!!
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