Hey folks,

I know you guys and gals will have some insight into this.

I'm working on a customer's Dell system that, after a few or more
flicks of the power button, will not POST. Usually, a couple of
toggles of the reset button will get it going.

MB has good power. Fans come on. But will not get into post. (And, for
what it's worth, Dell's own diag lights do not come on when the system
doesn't boot.)

I popped a post probe on it and noticed that we're not even getting
past address latching to the CPU.

This behavior continues even when all boards are removed, including
RAM. (If the system gets into POST with no RAM, it, of course, beeps.)

If I leave the CPU in (it's an S1, P3) and the p/s connected, I can
still trigger the behavior by powering the system on and off a few
times.

Perhaps interestingly, when the system is in this POST-less state,
soft-power is initiated; you must hold down the power button to shut
the system off again. If it gets into POST, a quick push of the button
shuts it off.

This is an under warranty Dell system and since I'm relatively new to
the independent repair game, I don't have spare parts to swap in an
out. I've secured a mainboard from Dell and swapped that out. No
difference. I now have a Dell p/s I will try. After that, I suppose
we're talking control panel or CPU.

Some questions:

1. What do you guys think?

2. Is there any way to rule out the control panel without getting
another one? Perhaps shorting the soft-power pins to turn it on and
off without the control panel attached?

3. I don't have a replacement P3 to try out, but I do have a number of
slot-1 terminators for multi-cpu systems. What do you guys think of
using one of those to rule out the CPU. Having never done that before,
I can only guess that the BIOS would beep. But if it beeped _every
time_ I turned the system on, that would point to the CPU.

Unfortunately, talking to some of Dell's folks is like some kind of
mental sword fight. Thrust-parry-dodge. Ugh.

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated!!

Cheers,

Mike Whalen

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