I own two AsRock DeskMini 310 as a solution for my internal virtualization Infrastructure. Both of them are very reliable but sometimes once they power off they do not turn back on. And since that happened yesterday again i remembered that i never blogged about that ;-) The first time this happened i was quite astonished. I had a power outage and after that, the DeskMini 310 didn’t turn back on. What i tried:
- Measured the power supply which was all fine (and it was squeaking as usual)
- Tried to pull the power for a while
- Unplug hard-drives, change memory
Nothing helped. After a while i remembered an old trick which helped with one of my former PCs (i believe it was a Pentium 133 Mhz or so): Pull the BIOS battery. And that solved the case!
So you have to follow these steps:
- Unplug the power supply and all other cables (e.g. network).
- Open the case from the back (4 screws).
- Pull the mainboard out - be careful with the internal cables.
- Unscrew the mainboard with it’s 4 screws, one in each corner.
- Carefully lift the mainboard from the side that is usually pointing to the front.
- Then pull it gently to the front-side to move the connectors out of the backplate. Take care in case you have connected a SATA drive.
- Under the mainboard you will find the cable of the Bios Battery. Unplug and wait 10 seconds.
- Plug BIOS battery back in.
- Carefully slide the mainboard back into the backplate while slightly angling the mainboard.
- Fix the four screws of the mainboard back into place.
- Carefully slide the mainboard back into the case. Make sure that you have connected the cable to the front connectors in case you disconnected it.
- Fix the four screws of the case back into place.
Once you turn the DeskMini back on you will see that it lost all BIOS settings (including the Time) but at least it turns back on ;-)