Milleron wrote:
On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 21:30:00 -0600, "Don Burnette"
wrote:

P2B wrote:
Don Burnette wrote:
Here's one for the books, if anyone has any idea what I did wrong,
I would be curious to know, as I don't want this to happen again.

Did you remove standby power and take ESD precautions while working
inside the case? Failure to do either or both could have killed your
motherboard.

The chances of damage are very low - I know people who have built
and upgraded many computers with standby power on and a poke at the
case to discharge static electricity, and gotten away with it, but
sooner or later...

OTOH, it's more likely your motherboard just died naturally at the
same time you decided to install a new CPU. - cooling and warming
cycles stress electronic components, so they tend to fail at power
on or shortly thereafter rather than while running. The board might
have failed then even if you'd just shut down & taken the cover off
to blow dust out.

Another possibility is solder failure - the board always flexes a
bit during cooler installation, which can be the last straw for a
bad solder joint.


Yes, I took all the precautions that I usually do. Used my
anti-static wrist strap, made sure power was off and drained, etc.
Perhaps the board just plain failed at that time.
One thing that may have done it - I put the new cpu, heatsink,
memory, etc in while the board was still mouted to the slide in mb
tray. This allowed it to flex down a little as pushed memory in, etc.
Perhaps it just had a bad solder joint that cracked at that time -
who knows, I will be puzzled over that one for a while. Perhaps I
should have removed the mb from the tray and kept it on a flat
surface.


That's almost surely the reason the board failed. I've gotten away
with replacing a heat sink without removing the board from the case,
but I knew at the time that it was likely to break something (I did it
because I didn't really care if I had to upgrade motherboards).
Ron


Yes, I have about narrowed it down to either that or a corrupt bios.
Thanks,

--
Don Burnette