One of my friends found recently an older gaming motherboard he had that he was going to throw away because he had no need for it. I said I'd take it off of his hands if he is just going to toss it out because I have a socket 939 Athlon 64 3500+ CPU and a pile of DDR RAM sticks not being used, as well as a bare case to stuff it into. It was pulled as a working board back around 2009 and sat in his closet in an ESD bag ever since. The CPU and RAM he ended up selling to some other friends so it was just a bare board. The board is also very clean like new condition and so no dirt and dust in CPU socket etc.
Installed everything successfully and the motherboard got past POST and started to go through the installation process of Windows XP, and then part way through I got a fast BSOD and then it rebooted itself. I then tried again and Windows XP would not boot off the OEM install CD. So I figured maybe its a bummed DVD-ROM, and so I swapped it out with another knon good IDE CD-RW drive and it started the boot process off the drive and then the disk was just going forever without getting to the installation process but instead just a blinking curser it top left corner.
So I then held power button in and then turned it back on and swapped the Windows XP disc with memtest86 and ran that for 4 hours successfully without any problems reported.
So I then grabbed another known good not scratched like new XP install disc like the other and booted off of that and this time it started to get to the install process where its writing files to the HDD which is also IDE btw and not a SATA drive as for to get a SATA drive to work with this motherboard I would have to use a floppy to get the SATA driver ready through part of the XP install or instead use a SP2 slipstream. While files were breing written it then did a BSOD and rebooted itself.
So I then decided to swap the 80GB IDE HDD with a known good 40GB HDD and try again, once again it got to where it was installing files to HDD during install and a flash of a BSOD and reboot.
So I then swapped out the IDE cable just to eliminate that and still same problem. As well as checked to make sure the jumpers were set to Master/Slave on the drives to avoid those issues. No problems there for a non-CS cable and HDD as Slave and CD-RW drive as Master on IDE channel 1
The CPU I installed I know is good because it came from a working computer of which the main board was too limited ( NO AGP or PCIE port ) and so I gave this motherboard to a friend who needed one for a HTPC and he had a better than a Athlon 64 3500+ to stuff into it so I kept my CPU.
I then swapped out the 2 x 512MB DDR400Mhz matched pair Edge Memory sticks ( 1GB )
Still same issues.
Swapped the power supply with a known good 350 watt and still same issues.
Checked the capacitors and found no issues thinking maybe it had the bad caps issue that many boards had of that period.
I tried to then get it to boot off of a Live Linux distro and it gets part way through the Linux load and just hangs at a solid white display and no drive activity.
What stinks is that the BSOD crash is so fast that I cant read it to write down the info, and without Windows installed to it I dont think I have any options for logging the crash info.
I suppose I might be able to point a video camera at the display and record the boot and then try to freeze the frame that captures the error message, but I havent gotten that far into this yet due to lack of time with FLL Robotics that I was dealing with as a coach for the middle school robotics team that I am leading/teaching.
Maybe I should just yank the CPU and RAM out of this board and just toss it since its not that critical and fast of a system, but figured I'd post this here first to see if anyone has any suggestions on what to check before sending the motherboard to recycle/landfill?
Here is the motherboard info:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128306
