Repairing a motherboard

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BeerCat

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Has anyone succesfully repaired a motherboard? My pc is turning itself off and blue screening randonly and after a full cleanup i noticed a burnt capacitor on the MB. Considering how close eveything is together it looks like a nightmare. First thing would be to identify the cap i guess. Its an old pc but unsure of the exact model as well.
 
Yes, I've recapped a few faulty motherboards. Some manufacturers have a habit of using cheap electrolytic capacitors that fail prematurely. Recapping comes down to the economics of what you can get the capacitors for and/or if you need someone to do it. They are normally low ESR type electrolytics.
 
you can swap a cap but what caused it to fail? if it's just the one duff component fine but if not..... it's your time but I'd (cost permitting) be looking for a replacement board.


aamcle
 
Good to know its possible then. Repairing it looks fiddly but i have in the past repaired the flat screen i am using now and a pair of active speakers by changing the capacitors. I was thinking maybe i could be lucky again. I have looked for a replacement board but as its probably 10 years old i cant be sure if they are compatable. I will post some photos later once my phone is charged and see if i can identify the cap and the MD details. Thanks
 
I've recapped many fabulous 1970s audio amplifiers which would otherwise have been junk. The caps deteriorate with time, and replacing 50+ of the buggers is great fun! Your obviously faulty one will cost a few pence and is worth swapping out - nowt to lose.
 
I dont suppose you can find circuit diagrams for the boards so i can try and find the part before i take it to bits. Otherwise i wont be able to connect for a while. Could wait until i have a new one them try i guess.
 
Next question is if replace the mb with a different make but same spec will it work? Would a different manufacturers md need different drivers?

You would need to ensure the board was the same chipset for your processor and all that. Also it's not some custom form factor

Other than that it should be OK. I assume you don't have any special OC components. Just be carefulate about things like graphics cards if you have them.

You may have some driver issues to iron out if you're going to just fire the hard drive up
 
You would need to ensure the board was the same chipset for your processor and all that. Also it's not some custom form factor

Other than that it should be OK. I assume you don't have any special OC components. Just be carefulate about things like graphics cards if you have them.

You may have some driver issues to iron out if you're going to just fire the hard drive up

Thanks mate. Its a different brand mb. Acer and mine is foxconn but the chip is exactly the same. I think i may try an experiment and buy a new drive to clone this one to. Then i will plug it in my other pc and see what happens. If i can get it running i dont have to worry about replacing this board. Main problem is i no longer have the installers for all the sw on there. If i can get it going i can pull the board apart and attempt a fix. Grrr so much fun. :mrgreen:
 
So i took out my c drive, cloned it and tried to boot my newer pc up with it. Windows 10 was no problem but the XP installations blue screened. I attempted a repair using the win xp disc but did not even recognise the HD. The weird thing is one of the partitions does not show apart from the legacy boot menu.
Another thing now i have both sides of the case of its crashing much less often. Makes me think its a cooling problem so ordered more thermal compound and i am going to try that first.
 
depends how your cloning s/w worked.. If it identified NTFS partitions and copied them , it may not have recognised the redundant XP legacy versions of ntfs and replaced them with the win10 ntfs standard which the XP system would be unable to read or recognise.

google for cloning s/w known to work with xp ntfs partitions and win 10 ntfs.

A *nix system booted off a usb stick to perform a 'dd' copy shuld work. it is a low level tool which should provide a true clone, back in the day when i did this sort of thing for a living I would use Norton/symantec Partition Magic but thats not a free tool.

NTFS as used with XP has been developed with win7 and win10 system additions, so the cloning system needs to cater for that. either by copying at a lower level or recognising the differences and replicating them.

so its not surprising the win xp installation disk wont recognise a win10 ntfs partition
 
depends how your cloning s/w worked.. If it identified NTFS partitions and copied them , it may not have recognised the redundant XP legacy versions of ntfs and replaced them with the win10 ntfs standard which the XP system would be unable to read or recognise.

google for cloning s/w known to work with xp ntfs partitions and win 10 ntfs.

A *nix system booted off a usb stick to perform a 'dd' copy shuld work. it is a low level tool which should provide a true clone, back in the day when i did this sort of thing for a living I would use Norton/symantec Partition Magic but thats not a free tool.

NTFS as used with XP has been developed with win7 and win10 system additions, so the cloning system needs to cater for that. either by copying at a lower level or recognising the differences and replicating them.

so its not surprising the win xp installation disk wont recognise a win10 ntfs partition

Cheers Fil. I should of put the drive straight into my old pc instead of the new one first to see what happened. Had been a long day. I realised after i cloned the disc i should of used advanced settings as well. The drive was much larger so it increased each partition size. I use acronis which has worked well in the past. It did take nearly a day to copy a 128gb ssd though and this time it was an hour for much more data. I tend to only do this stuff every 4 or 5 years and by then have forgotten everything.
 
I bought a replacement sh mb and when i took out the old one i noticed 3 caps which were heat damaged. Would of almost definitly of screwed something up trying to replace those with my knackered old iron. All works but i need to swap the chip over. The new one is a celeron and mine was a quad core and i am noticing the difference. How hard are they to replace? I presume i need an earth band?
 
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