Dead CF-18K, please help me troubleshoot

I've acquired a known dead CF-18, it was cheap and I bought it for spare parts for my existing fleet (lol there are only 2) of Aussie CF-18D's. I was expecting another battered CF-18D or earlier given the price.

But when it arrived I have found that it is a mint condition CF-18K! This thing looks like its just come out of the box.

But.... it doesn't work. The seller is no help as to what happened as they are just passing it on from a job lot.

You can switch on with the power button, and the green power LED comes on, but nothing else happens, no screen display (on external monitor too), no beeps, nothing. The HDD spins up though, but that just means its getting power.

To switch off you have to hold the power button for a few seconds, which indicates something more fundamental is going on than just a dead gpu etc. And you don't get the warning beep when you do that like you normally would.

So I have checked the basic things, checked for obvious signs of fluid ingress, pulled the CMOS battery, removed the miniPCI card, and outboard RAM, but its still the same.

So before I go any further I'd appreciate some expert opinion as to what is the likely cause and how I could test that theory further. I have a CF-18D I can pinch parts out of for testing.

Cheers.

 

I wish I could help more. I had a 2 CF 51's that acted exactly the same. 1 did not have any memory in it DOH!. The other, I never did figure out. I wrote it off as bad mb and used it for parts.

 

Ok well I've swapped out the mobo with one from a CF-18D and everything is working.

So it looks like its a dead mobo which kind of sux, since a used replacement 1.2GHz/512MB CF-18K mobo is around $175 shipped. That is a fair bit more than I paid for the entire thing.

Now I remember why I bought this thing in the first place - the price of spare parts is simply astronomical, compared to what a whole machine goes for (working or not). Oh well.

I might try and bake the mobo in the oven and see if it revives it, may as well, it will be going in the bin either way huh.

 

It's alive! MUAHAHAHAHAHA! I've only ever baked one other mobo before and it didn't work, so I wasn't holding much hope but it was worth a shot.

So first bake was for 10 minutes at 375. When I powered it on I was surprised to see a minor sign of life that wasn't there before - the screen backlight came on and there was a flashing cursor in the top left corner. Nothing more, nothing less, only happened the once too before it went back to its usual level of deadness.

So back into the oven for a full half an hour at 375, et viola. Now I just need to reinstall windows since my recovery image is for CF-18D and it won't boot that since this is i915 chipset (at least thats all I'm hoping it is).

 

I have used that trick a couple of times on a dell motherboard and an xbox motherboard to reflow the solder connections, sometimes it works sometimes it does not, looks like you got lucky, congratulations, let us know how it holds up over time.

 

Turns out its already a bit unstable. I get a GPU crash (screen display turns to rubbish) which fully locks the machine. Usually it can boot into XP, but as soon as you do any system type benchmarking (specifically GPU) it crashes. CPU benchmarking and burn-in works fine so the CPU is good.

Memtest86+ shows errors and also always GPU crashes around 25% into the test.

So it looks like its going back into the oven, maybe for an hour this time lol. Actually a heatgun would be a better option if I had one. I'm sure its the i915 NB chipset that is the culprit, or the onboard RAM would be my second choice if its not NB. Pity you can't disable the onboard RAM in these.

 

Well the hot air SMD rework station I bought off eBay arrived today. So I masked off with foil tape all around the Northbridge and Southbridge ICs and attempted to reflow them.

Slapped it all back together and I've just passed 2.5 hours of memtest86+ and still going strong. Best 50 bux I ever spent.