Hi everyone,
I just bought a GA-Q35M-S2 motherboard from eBay. The board is 2 months old and decommisioned from a datacentre server. When the mains is plugged in, the system fires up, my hard drive spins and initializes. About 2-4 seconds later the system shuts down with a clank from the hard drive. I've only ever used Gigabyte motherboards at home and work (I'm a PC repair engineer), and know this is not normal behaviour. Once the system does this it will power on as normal and everything, it's as though it's a power self test, but it's going to do some damage to the hard drive over time.
I'm aware that a system usually powers on by itself if the BIOS power management is set to on mains failure, as I have most of my servers set this way. However, this board has no such option, nor does it stay running. The specs are:
Case: AOpen H340 slimline case
PSU: 400W EZ-Cool TFX Power supply
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Q35M-S2
BIOS Revision: F7 (latest)
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 6320 1.86GHz
RAM: IGB GEiL DDR2 667
HDD: Western Digital 80GB SATA
Optical: Samsung SH-D163 IDE DVD-ROM drive
I've tried different power supplies, so I know it isn't that, and my 400W one has the 24pin & 8pin ATX connectors, so it has more than enough juice to power this system. It seems to be doing some sort of power test, but none of the computers I've ever built in the past (1000+ of them) have exhibited this symptom, and sooner or later the hard drive is going to be the first to be damaged with it keep firing up then clanking to a stop.
Anyone else with this board having the same issue?