Into the Void

Last night, my third-fastest computer, an AMD 761/VIA 686B/Athlon-XP 2100/512MB pc2100, became horribly unstable. For the past year it has run Gentoo Linux and I’ve used it mainly for development and running servers with very few problems. Last night though I started getting seg-faults during compilations, and running memtest86+ would fail in about 15 minutes. The first thing I tried was replacing the RAM, but memtest would still fail in roughly the same amount of time. Because of that I was reasonably sure the problem was not the RAM. That was bad news actually, because when memtest86 fails and it’s not the RAM’s fault, you probably have a damaged motherboard.

Luckily, I had a spare Gigabyte motherboard with the exact same northbridge and southbridge chipsets (AMD 761/VIA 686B) as the Abit KG7 I had to replace. It took about an hour to do because I had to completely rebuild the system and clean and re-Arctic the CPU/heatsink. I crossed my fingers, rebooted, ran memtest, and no errors! And since the boards were completely interchangeable, Gentoo booted without a problem, which was a nice bonus.

One thing still bothered me though… typically when motherboards go bad, you will not even get a POST, let alone be able to boot an OS. In this kind of situation the problem is usually bad RAM, but that was not the case this time. In fact, take a look at the capacitors near the CPU and memory sockets: Angle #1 | Angle #2… I’m no Electrical Engineer, but it definitely looks to me like these capacitors are damaged. Without knowing more about the physics and composition of capacitors, I can’t really speculate as to what the material on top might be. It looks like rusty solidified discharge and its texture is rigid and crusty. If you have an idea what it is then let me know!