Question What does blinking power LED tell me?

[ImWolf]

MSI K9N Neo V2.0 MB
AMI v02.61 Bios
Dual boot 32 bit WinXP / 64 bit Linux Mint 19.3

Here's the very short version....

This old machine now will not boot Linux Mint at all (blink of an eye error msg, then machine turns off). Will sometimes boot WinXP thru Grub menu, but then shuts off once I try to run file Xfers. On the other hand though, I can let the machine hang at the Grub menu, or run the Linux Memory test for over 90 minutes and it won't shut down.

All fans will shut off, screen goes blank.... but power LED blinks at 2 second intervals. (2 seconds on, 2 seconds off) This goes on until I unplug machine or turn off the switch at the power supply. This is not sleep mode.... mouse, keyboard, power button do nothing.

Can't find anything describing this blinking LED online or in users manual. I called my local tech and he thinks it is a power supply related problem..... but I'm open to 2nd opinions.

Thanks,
Wolf

 

[kerberos_20]

what happens if you press power button?

 

[ImWolf]

After the machine has shut down and the power LED is blinking, hitting power button on the front panel does nothing.

This seems to be an intermittent problem..... my favorite kind! I was able to boot into XP about half an hour ago and have been running file transfers, e-mail client, and web browser normally since then.

Something tells me this won't last though.

Wolf

 

[ImWolf]

I'm not having any luck figuring this one out.... I called MSI support and they told me that the blinking LED is NOT a diagnostic of any problem.

What are some suggestions I can use to test if it's my MoBo or PSU that's causing the problem?

Thanks,
Wolf

 

[kerberos_20]

if pc doesnt power up, then some protection on PSU kicks in
try barebone setup on cardboard to rule out some shorts in pc case

 

[ImWolf]

Something I forgot to mention previously...

When boot fails trying to launch Windows I get no messages, but a message does fly by when trying to start Linux Mint. I set up my camera to record this so I could read what flew by:

[ 0.032518] Spectre V2 : Spectre mitigation: LFENCE not serializing, switching to generic retpoline

[ 1.404632] powernow_k8: [Firmware Bug]: No compatible ACPI _PSS objects found.

[ 1.404632] [Firmware Bug]: First, make sure Cool'N'Quiet is enabled in the BIOS.

[ 1.404632] [Firmware Bug]: If that doesn't help, try upgrading your BIOS.

Can someone tell me what generates this message, and how it might help me identify the problem?

I did get into the BIOS and enable Cool'N'Quiet, but the first part of the error message still appeared:

[ 0.032518] Spectre V2 : Spectre mitigation: LFENCE not serializing, switching to generic retpoline

Where does this message come from? CPU? Onboard chip? OS? BIOS?

Thanks,
Wolf

 

[ImWolf]

The machine does power up. Usually it makes it thru POST to the Grub menu, but twice now it died during POST.

I can let it hang at Grub forever..... I even ran 90 minutes worth of memory test. 2 days ago it booted into Windows and ran all kinds of programs for 4 hours.

After this I tried rebooting into Linux Mint and that failed.... has not booted any OS since.

Wolf

 

[kerberos_20]

linux first message you can pretty much ignore, spectre mitigations werent available on such old system, its just informs you that its using something else to mitigate it

if your concerned about it, then spectre mitigations were done in bios and in operating system
message says that your bios doesnt have any spectre mitigations...which is fine as spectre was founded just recently

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability)

what is your CPU?

 

[ImWolf]

Machine is not up and running, but from memory CPU is AMD Athlon 64 2x 6000+

(this is old equipment)