Hey everyone. I'm sure a few of us have come across either dead boards, or presumed dead boards. I for one came across another one recently, that I pronounced dead and later went back to (following day) on a hunch. I realized that the board was not powering up at all, and though I got the manual and made the connections and all, I still felt like something else was up.

As it turns out, I had the power connector on wrong - it was on the power LED pins instead. Big mistake on my part. What puzzled me though is that I went over the pins with a screwdriver to short them and power on the board and that didn't work - hence the sentence. Then I was thinking that maybe I could force the board to power up, drop in a POST card (SOYO TechAid) and see if the machine would come up at all.

Forcing on the machine was a theoretical situation, as I knew how to test a PSU outside of a case (short the green pin with any ground/black pin) and guessed that forcing it on would force power to all sections of the board.

So I tried and it worked, but my POST card showed an error code meaning CPU.... Then I thought about the CMOS jumper. Some board will not power up if the jumper is in the wrong place. I moved the jumper and the board started to go through the POST procedure! So I un-bridged the PSU and used a wire to short the pins on the board and found the correct power button pins. Turns out that I read the abbriviation for the description of each pin instead of the full description in the manual. Next time I'll read a bit more of the manual before doing any connection. Funny thing though, the board is one of those with absolutely no key on the board of the connectors - so if you don't have the manual you'd never know what goes where.

Hope someone finds this useful. For those boards that don't power up, you could bridge the PSU and force it and check the POST to see if it moves or gets stuck at any particular point. If you have a POST card, that makes things easier as well.

PeAcE.