M11x R1 fan refuses to spin

Haven't had to post asking for help in quite a while, but I am completely and utterly stumped.

I am in possession of my old M11x on loan from a friend. He hadn't used it for a while, and I needed to borrow it for a week. He was complaining about it having overheating problems, which I didn't remember it having while I was the owner. When I got it, I noticed it was full of dust, so I cleaned it out with a can of air. I then re-installed 64-bit Windows 7 completely and installed the drivers from the Dell site, plus the latest NVIDIA drivers. (Running Discrete Mode and overclocked in BIOS)

The fan ran normally during installation, but once I got into the renewed install, it refused to spin. I installed Steam and ran a game to see if the stress would force it to spin, but it did not. I double checked to see if I had installed the chipset drivers, thinking that could be the issue, but I have the latest ones from Intel installed. I checked the BIOS version and I am on A05. I tried with EIST on and off, no difference. I tried all power states, I tried fan control with both HWInfo32 and 64 and neither seem to let me access the fan correctly. I tried a modded BIOS that gives access to the fan trip settings, but none of the changes there helped. The new BIOS did let HWInfo see the fans but did not allow me to change values or spin the fan.

Any ideas? I may re-install Windows later just to see if the fan spins during install again. That would at least rule out a hardware problem.

Thanks!

 

You may have damaged to fan when you blew it out with the compressed air. I really dont recommend anyone using compressed air from the outside to blow out a fan. It's only really good for when you actually have the machine apart and the heatsink in front of you to blow it out with the air. If you blow the dust from outside where is it going? Deeper inside the machine which can only cause more problems in the future - you might have even blown it into the bearing for the fan which might have caused it to fail.

Have you run HwMonitor to check the temperatures? It's possible (unlikely) that the machine isnt getting hot enough to spin the fan.

 

I did take it apart to clean out the fan. Got down to the bare motherboard and cleaned it up. Installed windows afterwards when the fan was spinning, so all the connections are still fine.

Temps are above 65C in HWInfo when web browsing, well above fan trip level.

 

You'll need to replace the fan in that case then - it is never good blowing directly onto the fan particularly in the m11x as it is small and the bearing can be damaged easily.

 

It does sound like the fan needs to be replaced, here's the part number you need: 5M8N2 - THERMAL MODULE