The Unexpected Solution for a 𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐝 Motherboard 

Nice one :) Glad you kept investigating and now we all learned something new. Thumbs up!

Wow - this is very weird behavior. I wonder if there is something on this board that can be identified to cause this requirement for delayed switch-on - and if it could be disabled. This seems to be a big inconvenience. One could just waste hours to find nothing wrong with this board and then ... Oh, wait. You did! :) Thanks for sharing this info. Great video!

I have to say, this is most interesting repair I've seen lately

You are quite welcomed Tony! And nice job with the headers :) Sorry i didn't had the time to design a pcb for it ( the lats two weeks were crazy busy for me ), but anyway if any pcb is drawn then it should be on the updated version i showed you after the fix and it would have delayed you. I think i will do it as soon as i can, and maybe in two versions, SMD and THT and post here in comms a link to all it's files ( tests and gerbers included ). Cheers! Marian.

Congratulations!! . The world works when the community helps each other. I hope this channel grows a lot more.

Near the end of the "Jumper Manual" for the V58 board, it mentions "Power Supply Selection". It has either Resume, or Traditional settings. Resume = JP1 pins 3+5, and pins 4+6 closed. JP15 pins 2+3 closed. Traditional = JP1 pins 1+3, and pins 2+4 closed. JP15 pins 1+2 closed. I would guess "resume" means it should power up as soon as you apply power / Ground the Green with on your ATX adapter. And "traditional" means it will wait for the power button signal. Could be worth a try?

If you want to simplify your power on circuit I think I can help. IF you put a large value capacitor in series with the energizing coil of the relay with a high value resistor in parallel with the capacitor. Since DC doesn't pass through the capacitor it will deenergize the coil after a short period of time because the capacitor reaches a fully charged state. This way the coil doesn't have to be in an "always on" state for the computer to run.

F.Y.I. Acer V58 was used on Fujitsu MV205, MVII265, MVII267 Micro Tower sized system. The characteristic is that in order to keep 6 available slots, peripheral connectors are case or bracket mounted.

Great work Tony and by the community here as well! Back in the socket 370 days I had a board that had a similarly strange but different power on problem that caused a no boot condition. I had built a plain desktop PC for my now ex-wife's parents who lived on a farm. Everything was just fine for several months but after a bad thunderstorm the modem stopped working. Seems like the PCI modem may experienced some excess voltage via the phone line during a storm. After I removed & replaced the modem the machine would not display any video or POST from being off unless I first pressed the reset button on the case after powering it on. Prior to the modem replacement, even after the modem stopped working, the machine would boot just fine every time! I tried re-seating all the components, flashing the BIOS and even stuck in a different video card and RAM with no change. The really weird thing was I was messing around in the BIOS, trying different system settings to see if any of them would change the no POST w/o a reset on a cold boot behavior and I found one that did! The machine was equipped with a Celeron 600 CPU and the mainboard was a jumperless one. If I changed the FSB to almost anything ABOVE the default 66 MHz the Celeron 600 was designed to run at the machine would POST every time. After a little testing I found that the machine appeared to be 100% stable at a 75 MHz FSB and would happily run at 675 MHz. So I gave the machine back with a new modem and told my ex in-laws that I sped their computer up a little while I was at it. I never did find out what happened to that machine in the long run as I divorced my 1st wife a couple of years after that and didn't see much of those in-laws as they lived a couple of hours drive away.

I’m totally gobsmacked! I never thought you’d get to a solution. Well done and really appreciative of all your efforts

Congrats on sorting out this one!

Great work getting this board back up and running!

Awesome you found out what it was! CF can have problems sometimes, sometimes it’s weird incompatibilities between udma modes and the cables, sometimes it only works with a 40, other times only with 80 cables. You don’t have a cable which should avoid the problem but probably it’s another weird incompatibility of CF.

Nice to see that finally the mystery solved Tony my congrats! I really do believe it was a difficult riddle cause this behavior was really strange and made the board completely unusable. I have a question thought, does this header also turns off the computer? A soft off before ATX, so you don't have to toggle the main physical switch but use an AT PSU?

That was really interesting. Nice finding!

Amazing Toni! Thank you for sharing your contagious joy with us! I'm as happy as much as you for this success and we all have learned something !

Great video!

The amount of commitment that you put for the work and videos is outstanding. Well done. Thanks.😊

Probably was in some industrial equipment, which has a power switch with a third contact that does this. You can also add on a single molex socket, and feed 12V via the 10R resistor to the HW monitor socket, and have the fan connector work as well, as the original HW monitor board likely did this as well.

Nice job Tony. I have learned something more now. Interessting. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands

15:06 This is the motherboard equivalent to Biff's car from back to the future. Only he knows how to start it up.

Very impressive thinking outside the box! Well done and everybody learned a lot

This is wild. Imagine that!

I enjoyed watching this episode 🙂

Hey its Marco - your Coffee link leads to 404 error.... On the other side - awesome Video again!

Great job Tony! With a litle help from our friends.

Great work 👌👏💯 i am impressed Congratulations

Awesome work and so satisfying to get an ending to the story.

Nice to see you *tinker* up a solution for this odd power sequence!

Very nice! This reminds me of an issue I had on my first PC build: Shuttle SFF SN45G (NF2 chipset & Athlon XP) with Radeon 9800 Pro All-In-Wonder graphics. The system would not boot normally, and in researching the issue I found that a delayed plugin of the video card extra power connector resolved it. So I built a little relay + RC delay circuit to fix it. :-) That board finally died a few years ago, but I still have the Molex delay circuit harness I built for it.... just in case. ;-) I also built a little circuit for it to manually adjust the memory voltage (for overclocking, due to a BIOS issue)... but that's another story!

Hi Tony, I just watched your video and have a suggestion you might want to try out. According to the board, JP1 and JP15 control the power supply configuration between 'Traditional' and 'Resume' mode. After some investigation, it appears the configurations are as follows: Traditional (current setup on your board): JP1: 1 & 3 closed, 2 & 4 closed JP15: 1 & 2 closed Resume: JP1: 3 & 5 closed, 4 & 8 closed JP15: 2 & 3 closed I suggest changing JP1 and JP15 to the 'Resume' configuration and attempting to power on the PSU without your custom circuit. I believe this setting might be this board's version of the 'Turn on after AC power loss' function found in the BIOS of modern systems. By changing these jumper settings, you may be able to power the system on and off without needing your custom circuit, by just using the switch from the PSU. Best regards, Michiel

One eye is laughing one is crying. Happy to find the solution for this particular problem. Unhappy because the power up sequence still be a misery for us seeing four lines on the post card so many times. It would worth to investigate where the signal pin is connected from that switch (jumper). Possibly to a gate input and the other gate input got an RC timed signal as well. When the two signals are present than the gate output changed. What would be great is to know where the gate output is connected, to which pin of the chipset. I understand you spent countless time on this MB but if there is a canche to get it an another 30 minutes than maybe this direction would be worth to investigate to fully solve this "no start" problem.

Congrats 🎉

Great vid, When you have to make boards like that you know its time to start learning PCB design ;) Trust me when I say there is nothing better than receiving a board you have put together in design software. Top tip, if and when you learn, before sending it off to manufacture, check it and check it again. you'll make many silly mistakes and checking thoroughly is key.

World Domination is a good point on ya list ... oh and besides that, a lot of interesting (sometimes simple) points to check.

That was some journey... :) Bravo Tony, always an inspiration... but still cannot find the courage to try making videos myself...

Wow i forgot about the reset vector. Nice. Interesting board and issue. It being likely a server board, they probably made it to a higher quality standard than the usual you see of them.

Thank you!

nice work! .. I was thinking waaaaay to complicated

Thanks for these videos, Tony. I had a similar experience with an Intel RC440BX in which it did not work because the BIOS Jumper did not work well and went into recovery mode all the time. The problem I have now is that once it works, an unlock keyboard message appears and that's why the keyboard doesn't work, so I can't do anything about it. Can you think of how to unlock the keyboard? I have tried a lot of things without success

So, forgive the wall of text (and useless knowledge...) The power supplies in AcerPower computers of a similar vintage had a 3-pin "soft start" ATX style circuit- which ran to a three pin connector in addition to the standard P8 and P9. The connector (if memory serves) has a 5v constant, Power-on, and Ground. The "power bottom"🤣 connector was a momentary switch that, when pressed, would tell the board pull the Power-on to ground, turning the power supply on. Which would explain why the board needs to see that circuit momentarily grounded before it will initialize and POST.

Maybe the problem with that motherboard is due to a capacitor. Switching on, a current peak occurs, and the capacitors stabilize the power line. But if one fails, the current peak produces an error in the program and crashes. When we introduce a delay, the motherboard starts with the voltage stabilized. It's a possibility because problems due to electrolytic capacitors are quite common. Finally, the solution of adding a transistor was perfect, but there are other ways, such as using an integrated NE555 type. I had fun with the repair, your videos are quite good.

Great video.

Thanks!

Wonder if the bios has an option for power switch behavior i had a few old boards where you can set delays on the power switch and also loss of power conditions like if power interupt to auto turn on or stay off.

Hi Tony! May be this MB use some proprietary PSU, with separately hardware monitor module? Glad for resolving the problem with this MB.

Could be an early case intrusion implementation. Some kind of switch setup that would prevent the system booting when the case was off? I would have to guess it was a workstation board with anti tamper circuitry. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a jumper somewhere on the board to enable/disable it, possibly a bridge if they were particularly stubborn about people bypassing it. An interesting board. I never encountered anything like this on consumer boards in the 90's.

So at its most basic level, you could say it wasn't working because you wasn't switching it on, lol. Well done figuring out the timing of that weird switching set up, my overkill unnecessary solution would have involved a 555 timer ;) Great video as always and good to see you won.

That seems odd. I was thinking maybe the header could be for one of those chassis switches that detect whether the chassis is open, but if there really has to be a delay, I guess it's not.

You are amazing!

damn, it was so simple, you even got a response from necroware, you’re becoming famous ! Mi fa piacere ahahah

i wonder if power good signal on atx connector is active high or low because it would flip instantly after power suply stabilizing all voltages so feeding it to that connector with or without some basic logic circuit might also work

What a weird issue! At least it was figured out in the end, it's really interesting

So you made a time delay relay to get rid of the Power ON issue? That was something unexpected! Need to remember what you did with the power button just in case I bump into a motherboard that doesn't want to power on. Thanks a lot!

Acer/IBM Aptiva; I'm familiar with the IBM, has AT style power connectors with an extra power connector (3 pin I think) for the 'soft power' button.

I wonder if just a capacitor across the power button pins would do it. At power-on it would look like a short as it starts charging up through whatever pullup resistor is in the logic, once it charges up enough to go over some voltage threshold (around 1 or 2 volts) it should look like an open switch.

I had a computer doing something like that too. To power it on I had to power it on by either the outlet or the switch on the power supply, wait a few seconds, turn it off, wait a few seconds, turn it on again... and it would power itself on, even when set to not power on after power outage. Power button sometimes worked, most times it didn't do anything.

i knew what the problem was, Tony, but i didn't wanna tell you :)) (i kidd, of course). an interesting repair, nonetheless, love this repair videos of yours

Somewhere out there is an original Acer machine with this board in it...with the original power supply. It would be interesting to see this.

just out of curiosity, did you try shorting the pins 19-20 on CN19 ? in the manual the connector you were using CN18 is labeled power button, and CN19 pins 19-20 are labeled power switch.

what about trying a momentary normally closed push button on the power bottom pins?

Welcome to the wonderful world of OEM proprietary mannerisms. I have some Siemens Nixdorf machines that have some extra cables and connector pigtails coming out of the PSU ang going to mystery headers on the board. No idea yet what they do, what the pinouts mean or whatever. Just am afraid that these PSU's might stop working and I have no idea how to replace them. Suppose that motherboard also had one of these proprietary PSUs where you just pressed a single button and the signal went to 3 different places. I feel those were the early days, things like proprietary power connectors and all kinds of other shenanigans seem to have really peaked in the late 2010s.

It is a case check botton? it was in a special case back then??

What do you think that blue jumper is doing in the middle of that four pin header right next to your "delay" board. The pin closest to the edge of the board connects to the fan +ve line. Is it possible that moving the blue jumper to the pins closest to the edge will provide the fan with power, and in some remarkable way do what you've just done with your "delay" board? Does the second pin from the edge have voltage on it when the board starts up? #justasking

the acer boards a usually not ordinary ones. and also undocumented because they were sold in systems. great you've found the right starting sequence (shot in the dark, ain't it?). as far as I remember those times the producers gone mad on power saving features. I believe when you hold "power bottom" switch for 4 seconds it comes into a sleep state. but anyway you've sorted it out. one thing I don't like in that control board is that it's getting power from floppy connector. it should be much better to source 12 or 5 volts directly from mainboard.

Some Mudder Err=motherboards come with an "open case" feature, so I am wondering whether that momentary switch your switching is actually the two pins to facilitate that.. APU 👁👍

Someone should make a pcb for that with pcbway ;)

put the cap on the power-on pins.. 100uF the cap will look like a short on power on, but then open up from the 5v board logic.

You could try power on with removed blue jumper from that white connector... of by changing its position.

Haha how funny it is?! I would say RTFM but you said there is no such information?

You got a Power Bottom? 🤣

A lot of socket 7 boards don't play well with compact flash cards.

This would be an interesting reverse engineering project. Doubt the north or southbridge are involved and this might just go through some logic chips or to the bios, shouldn't be to complicated. But would take alot of time thats not worth the effort considering its working.

Necro Ware? Zitten die in 'n dooie componenten niche of zo?

I am guessing that the case that board came in had a power switch that operated in that manner..

Hello I speak for the whole "the internet" and our reply is Hello to you

Capacitor! Put a capacitor in place of that weird relay contraption.

almost sounds like the power good signal from the psu

555 chip would be perfect here

Well rigged!👍👍

ciao, complimenti per i tuoi video, un mio amico mi ha presentato il tuo canale. giacchè che ci sono volevo sapere siccome ho la stessa scheda di diagnostica, se mi può mandare per favore un documento per capire come funziona? grazie

Nice sometimes the solution is simple, need to recheck a 486 board that I do not get working.....

Umm yes older motherboards needed a proper switch for power not the same type of switch as modern atx "momentary" ?? Switch

power bottom 🤣

Just add a 555! Their only .37

10:30 When you have a motherboard with a header labeled POWER BUTTON (POWER BOTTOM) you connect a flipping button to it! RTFSS! SS is silk screen. If had this board, connecting a button to that header is the first thing i would do. You might not even need a relay. try connecting a capacitor across those pins, say a 470uF?

Good Job

Great video!