Question Upgraded SSD; now motherboard appears to be dead

jbreckmckye

Honorable
Jun 7, 2014
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10,510
This is an odd situation that crosses topics (storage, motherboards, general strangeness) and I'd appreciate some ideas.

Yesterday I fitted a new SSD (primary drive) to my desktop - it's a Samsung 860 EVO. I swapped out the old SSD and used the same SATA and drive power cable.

Initially things worked well but the machine began freezing. The first time this happened the mouse still worked and keyboard capslock etc. lights could be activated. Subsequent freezes were more dramatic.

During this time I tried using different SATA cables, swapping SATA points, etc. Nothing really helped.

This morning I had a freeze that developed into a black screen. At this point the fan became quieter, as though it were shifting power phases. Shortly after the machine became near silent.

I read that sometimes it's worth setting the SSD to run in AHCI mode, so I rebooted and tried again. This time the same thing happened but I got a spinny wheel for a few seconds first, before the whole thing died.

Now the machine will not boot at all. I can't see or hear any signs of it doing a POST. Unfortunately the mobo (Asrock 990fx Extreme 3) does not have an inbuilt speaker - an external one is coming from Amazon - so I can't tell if the machine can do e.g. diagnostic beeps when the memory dimms are removed.

Removing the CMOS battery and leaving untethered from power does not help.

What is going on here? Could a bad SSD cause a motherboard failure? Did I possibly damage the mobo whilst manipulating the drives? The machine was unplugged and I felt no static shocks.

Finally - what could have been going wrong with my SSD? It was like the connection or the power to it was suddenly failing. There wasn't a gradual degradation, it was sudden and dramatic, with all operations pretty much ceasing.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
 
I think you are making the natural assumption the last change you made to your PC is the reason it's suddenly started to fail, but that may just be a coincidence. It's just as likely one of the other parts in your machine is failing because it's getting old. Can you list the parts in your computer?
 

jbreckmckye

Honorable
Jun 7, 2014
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10,510
Quite possibly, yes. The other parts are a Corsair CXM 750w (6 years old); an old CD ROM drive; a GTX 770 graphics card (6 years old); and Kingston HyperX Blue DIMMs (7 years old).

One thing, actually: a couple of months ago I seemed to have a CMOS battery failure. When I took out the battery, left the mobo and reseated it, things came back to life. I wonder if the battery has failed again permanently, coincidentally at the same time as I changed my SSD.
 
Failed battery has to be replaced (not reseated).
You can buy a replacement "CR2032 3V" at Walmart for a few dollars.

duracell-cr2032-3v-procell.jpg
 

jbreckmckye

Honorable
Jun 7, 2014
6
0
10,510
Replacing the CMOS battery appears to have restored things.

The SSD issue seems to be a separate problem - apparently the 860 EVO is known to have trouble working with AMD chipsets. My motherboard is an Asrock 990FX with AMD southbridge.

Samsung's line is that the best solution is to just use an Intel chipset instead! I think I'll just return the SSD for a refund.