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Gateway gt4022 Won't Boot | Won't Post | Dead Motherboard

The title says most all, the system would start to act as though it was powering up. The LED would come on for a second and the fans would start. The fans stayed on, but the LED went right back off a…

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Avery J. Parker

IT veteran, maker educator, and author of Network Ninja, 3D Printing Mastery, and AI Workflow Mastery. Business IT: Diversified Tech Solutions.

The title says most all, the system would start to act as though it was powering up. The LED would come on for a second and the fans would start. The fans stayed on, but the LED went right back off and the system didn't seem to POST, or show anything on the onboard video. This is a Gateway gt4022 with a 64 bit AMD processor and I think was Media Center edition of Windows XP. Anyway, I pulled the memory and CPU hoping to hear some sort of BIOS beep code, but no such luck. I pulled everything at one point with the exception of the power to the main board. It still gave the same symptoms. I tried another power supply just in case, same.... So, as I started to read online it seems that the motherboard in these Gateway gt4022's may be a problem....

There seemed to be a disproportionate share of posts claiming that their system had died the same or a similar way. I read of one person saying they replaced the motherboard in their gt4022 after one year and then THAT board died within another year. (I wonder about heat and the CPU though.) I didn't have another CPU to test with, but.... I recall AMD processors tended to run hot (the old Athlon line did). The venting for this doesn't have a fan directly on the CPU heat sink, but indirectly pulling air over the heat sink. I'm not sure that's as effective in getting the heat out.

Anyway, the hard drive was still fine, so the data can at least be pulled off.