[mythtv-users] EPIA mobo won't boot

[Shawn Rutledge]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 8:44 AM, Mike Perkins
<mikep at randomtraveller.org.uk> wrote:
> Now the box won't boot properly. It lasts about 10 seconds from button-push
> and then quits. My initial investigations show a possible earth loop, 3mV
> from end of S-video cable to minimyth chassis, but I don't think that's
> enough to cause problems. I swapped the power supply, same result. I've done
> the usual close inspection of the motherboard, no blown caps, no obvious
> brown areas, etc. I can get the thing to boot, if I keep powering it up and
> letting it keep trying. Eventually it lasts long enough to network boot and
> it's usually ok after that.

You said no blown caps, but I had the 600MHz fanless dual-LAN version
which stopped working and I think it was due to bad caps.   It started
crashing for no reason and I had to keep rebooting.  Then for a while,
I could boot DOS but not Linux (not that it was useful :-).  Later it
quit completely.  Finally I noticed most of the caps had rounded ends
- not blown, but expanded somewhat.  More time passed, and I started
using a WRT54G with OpenWRT for my router.  Recently I replaced the
caps on the Epia, and it still doesn't work, although the CPU gets
warm when power is applied - that's the only sign of life.