I have a problem, an irritating problem. I bought a purple motherboard form someone towards the end of last semister and while I had it home, it quit working. At the time of its demise(for lack of a better word), there was a slight smell of ozone. Just before this, the computer was running fine, but it crashed, so I shut it off. When I tried to turn it back on, only the HDD LED and fans turned on, and the harddrives spun up. But the main power LED stayed off, and no signal was sent to the monitor. The sound of the machine running sounded like there was something missing.

I removed everything not necessary to supply power to the motherboard, and turned it on, but nothing was different except that the HDD LED didn't turn on without the IDE cables plugged in.

I sent an email to ECS, the motherboard's manufacturer's Tech support, but I also wanted to find out what you guys thought. Here are the specs:

ECS K7VTA3 V8.o Motherboard
AMD Sempron 2200+ Processor (1.2 GHz)
Aftermarket 350+ Watt power supply
Low speed CD-ROM
256 MB PC2100 RAM
Integrated Ethernet
cheap PCI video card

I thought the processor may have fried, so I sent it to AMD, and the new one I got back still doesn't boot the motherboard. I am at a loss. I don't know what else to do to get this thing running again. Any suggestions to fix the problem?

Bad smells are usually not a good indication, of course.

To test the CPU you can always stick it in another motherboard and boot.

If your motherboard isn't fried, there could be a short in the case.. you can try removing the motherboard from the case and booting it up.. or re-mounting the motherboard in the case sometimes can fix those things. I assume you've reset the CMOS.. if not, give that a go.

I know the CPU is good. It just got here today.

How do I reset the CMOS? The whole BIOS thing with motherboards has kinda freaked me out a little, because I see warnings all over the place that indicate that you can really mess something up. Of course, if the thing isn't working right anyway, why not? But anyway... I have not reset the CMOS, do I need a floppy drive for that? Do I need a copy of something, or a boot disk? I used to have multiple towers that I could switch everything out with, but i took it all home for more space in the room. So I only have one tower, and it has a backup board in it at the moment. Since I have to dismantle everything and put it back together to run a test, I want to know exactly what to do.

To reset your BIOS: unplug machine, remove battery, find jumper to clear BIOS and move it, wait, move jumper back, replace battery, plug in machine.

It could be your power supply too. I had that trouble once, it would power devices but for some reason it wasn't powering the Motherboard. I have an ATX PSU tester, it wouldn't take more than a couple minutes to know if that's the problem.

Yeah, had the same problem with that electrical smell last year and it was the power supply also.

I am running a different motherboard with everything else the same minus the RAM and Processor. I know that everything else is good (including the PS), and that the processor is good. I tried a different PS in this motherboard too. Same result.

If I clear the BIOS, what will it use to boot, don't I need a boot disk after that? Or does it already have something built in?

No. The BIOS is a very low level part of the system. There are lots of customizeable setting in it (in particular, voltages, memory timings, bus speeds, what order to check drives for bootability, etc.) Resetting the BIOS (aka clearing the CMOS) only resets all the options back to their defaults. It also resets the system clock to something dumb like Jan 1 1998. You can restore your previous configuration after you do it. The BIOS is "processed" long before the OS even starts loading, so you don't need a boot disk or anything like that.