103G stops boot process

[Hermitman]

I'll throw in my 2 cents worth. The symptoms sound like a bad electrolytic capacitor, either at the power input of the board or in the on-board power supply if it has one. If these capacitors are bad, they can cause all kinds of problems. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. And if the power supplies in your computers put out slightly different voltages, the symptoms will be different or non-existent. They don't have to be bulging to be bad - that was big in the 90s when there was a bad batch out of the far east. The best way to check an electrolytic capacitor is with an ESR meter. Maybe you can borrow one from a friend or technician. Good luck.

 

[Larry1]

sound like a bad electrolytic capacitor

It may be even a bad capacitor on your motherboard and the extra load is causing the problem. I just got through replacing all the capacitors on my nephews motherboard because it was only intermittently powering up.

One more thing to check. Make sure that the card is fully seated in the connector. Lots of times cards will be pushed in and the bracket on the card (the bracket where you put the bolt in to hold it in place) will prevent it from fully seating in the connector. If you can remove the metal bracket and push it in the socket to test for this. Be carefull as you will have to put something (plastic?) to insulate the card from shorting to the cards in the slots beside them.

 

[colbec]

Thanks guys, comments appreciated. The board is an IBM product and should be good, perhaps a capacitor on the 103G board itself? One day I will find out since I will be upgrading the box to a faster processor/mb etc - the 1.8 barely manages the HD I am using it for and does not leave wiggle room for luxuries like recording. If I plug the card into a new faster computer box (it has stopped this 1.8 and a 400MHz as well) and it stops that one too then it is the card for sure.

It's a pity, if the box boots then the functionality of the 103G really offers quite a lot. When it works I really like it despite a few shortcomings.