[Blumpkinstein]

I have an older board, an Asus A7n8x Deluxe. I had been runnin a Duron in it and I am simply not satisfied by the performance or lack there of. Anyhow, I decided to pony up and get a Athlon 2800 XP.

As I was removing the old heat sink and fan, I slipped and put a small scratch on the Mobo, along some traces right on the left most edge of the Mobo (if you are looking down on the CPU from the back panel of the Mobo, with the PCI slots on the right of you.

Well, always being the optimist, I went ahead with the installation of the Athlon and all went smooth, made sure I had thermal grease, made sure I had my fan power connected, made sure it was all seated proper and I reconnected everythin back the way it was. I powered up, I could hear the system come to life BUT it won't POST. In fact the monitor will come to life just long enuff to show me the "NO Signal" message and goes into stand by mode (light goes from green to yellow).

Well, darn. I made sure I hadn't knocked the Vid card loose and even replaced the vid card but to no avail. I put the old CPU back in and I get the same results. I even removed the CMOS battery and "reset" it but alas it still wont POST.

Did I kill the board upon makin the small scratch? I think I did.

Is there any thing I am over-looking?

Worst case I buy a new Mobo.

 

[UncleMacro]

I'd take the motherboard out of the case and try to run it on a table with only the old CPU, one stick of RAM, the video card, and a keyboard and nothing else connected just to be sure it's really damaged. But if the minimum possible configuration doesn't work then you probably damaged it. When you're installing or uninstalling a heatsink with a screwdriver it's a good idea to put a small piece of cardboard next to the CPU socket in case the screwdriver slips off. I guess it's a bit late for that advice but now you know what to do next time. Newer motherboards tend to have a little protection strip in the screwdriver area but I still use the cardboard protecter trick because the protection strips are awfully thin.

There's a chance you might be able to recover the motherboard if you've shorted some of the traces together rather than broken them. When you hit a PC board with a screwdriver you often chip the solder mask (the colored stuff which covers most of the outside of the circuit board) and short a few traces together. If that's what happened then you might be able to isolate the traces again by taking a razor blade or XActo #11 blade (scalpel) and cutting back and forth between and parallel to the damaged traces. That will remove any conductive bridge you've made between the traces if you dig it out just right. But if you cut too deeply you can damage stuff underneath. You have to be careful when doing it. Reworking motherboards isn't easy even when you've got the correct tools. Whether that works or not depends on what kind of damage you've done but if the motherboard's a goner anyway then you've got nothing to lose by trying. I'd definitely make sure the motherboard is dead by trying the "minimum possible configuration drill" before putting your motherboard under the knife.

 

[Blumpkinstein]

Thanks for the advice. It shall be heeded. My skills are not quite up to the fine detail work, I am still studyin for my A+ and am currently subscribing to the, if dont work...throw it out and go buy a new one.

I will strip it and see if it POSTS but if alas it's time has come to pass I shall takes its remains to the backyard, dig a hole & play "Taps" with a kazoo. Then with a heavy heart I shall solemly bury it and shed a tear our dearly departed.

 

[Blumpkinstein]

Well I got my new Mobo from Newegg of course (I lub them) and rebuilt the system. I used the Quick Start manual that came with it as my "butter fingers" guard and worked great. The rebuild went smoothly, suprisingly enough, I am very "experienced" with building just not "fixing"...I spose that is why I am here.

Anyhow, usually when I do a build I like to start with a clean hard disk and do a fresh install of windows. I couldn't really do that this time, so I had to wing it. I figure since the old board is an older version of the board I just installed any of the MoBo drivers should work, except for the RAID and Gigabit lan.

To my surprise I was correct. All I had to do was give windows the drive disk from the new Mobo when it gave the obligatory "found new hardware" message.

Anyhow, no issues as of now. I will report when I have some, I am sure I will but for now runs like a champ, to my wife's delight, this was her gaming machine. :heartlove