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Old October 25th 04, 05:08 PM
Grumble
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Default PC refuses to boot

Hello all,

I've been pulling my hair for 3 hours over this problem, so I thought
I'd ask in here, and see if people have had a similar problem.

I have an oldish (bought 08/2001) Socket A motherboard (ASUS A7V133-C).
The chipset fan was starting to whine after collecting dust for 6 months
(since I last cleaned it up). As I've done several times, I unscrewed
the chipset fan, partly lifted the sticker in the middle, put a drop of
vaseline oil on the fan's axis, and used a vacuum cleaner to make the
fan spin for a while. I did the same to the CPU fan.

Is that stupid? Is there a better way to treat fans when they get dirty
and start whining?

Now, when I try to boot the system, all the fans start to spin for a few
seconds (it varies from 1 to 4), then everything shuts down (I hear
strange sounds in the PSU), and the POWER LED on the front panel blinks
steadily (about 1 second on, then 1 second off) as if the PC was in some
sort of deep sleep mode.

Any idea what this means?

After several hours testing different combinations, I noticed that I
could boot if I unplugged my hard disk drive (uh oh!). My HDD is an IBM
Deskstar 34GXP DPTA-372050.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/desk/ds34gxp.htm

I don't understand how cleaning the fans could have damaged the HDD.

NOTE: A few weeks ago, I thought the drive was experiencing the "click
of death" (I thought it was a 75GXP, don't know if 34GXP were affected).
I downloaded the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic tool from Hitachi, and ran it for
several hours. It found no problem with the drive.

I'm hoping you guys have some suggestions for me :-)

--
Regards, Grumble