Yesterday I opened my machine to dust and clean it. Was extra careful with it. After re-assembling it and booting it, I got a "cpu fan error sceeen". So I tried moving the CPU fan around, getting it to a new position, and now I'm not getting any signal input from my computer at all. I've already tried moving almost every piece around, unplugging all the unnecessary stuff, but still no result. Would appreciate some help with this as it's the weekend, aka my only moment of rest of the week.
Unplug everything except CPU, CPU fan and RAM, put the computer on the table outside of the case, plug the display into the internal GPU and start it by shorting the two power button pins with your screwdriver. If it starts, start plugging in components one after another to see what causes it to fail
I did that. Even the bare motherboard+cpu & fan + ram won't give me any output display. Looks like the motherboard is damaged, which is weird because it displays all the leds and the fans spin. Any way i can diagnose this further, e.g with a multimeter?
If the fan is spinning/hardware lights up but it's not hitting the UEFI/BIOS screen, you can probably get it to do the UEFI error codes: https://www.computerhope.com/beep.htm
Note: You'd need a speaker that is specific for the port to have the sound call out, and/or have a POST-card.
Are we talking about a laptop? When you power the computer on does the CPU fan spin? Did you verify that the CPU fan is plugged in? If the CPU fan was extremely dusty it might be dead and need to replaced or maybe it just got unplugged from the motherboard. Taking a picture of the board and the CPU cooler might help.
It's possibly a motherboard issue, you might have damaged it while moving parts around. If it had something to do with the fan, computer would probably boot and work for a few seconds/minutes.
So I tried moving the CPU fan around, getting it to a new position, and now I’m not getting any signal input from my computer at all.
Wait what? Are you talking about the CPU cooler fan that's supposed to be bolted onto your CPU with thermal paste applied? Cos if you moved that around you might not even boot cos the CPU is overheating.
What's your cpu and motherboard, if you have that info on hand?
When I say move around I mean I took off the radiator to add a bit of thermal paste, before building it all back in place(that was before booting it up). I built that computer myself so no worries about me breaking something that was factory made. After booting up and getting the fan error all did with the fan was plug it to another set of four pins and change what side of the radiator it was on. Which I ended up putting back in it's initial place eventually
Hmmm, then it sounds like maybe your CPU fan died- do what the other Chapo suggested and unplug everything and leave the case open/take it out and put it on a box. Then turn it on and check to see if your CPU fan is spinning etc.
The fan is spinning just right. Thats ain't my problem. My problem is that I don't get any display signal at all on my monitors. with or without the graphics card, with or without any disks/ram etc.
cpu wont instantly overheat at boot. even with zero heatsink it should last for a 10+ seconds before throttling
If you have the motherboard manual (or check a youtube video of the model's installation) you're gunna' have to doublecheck that to make sure you have all the wires in place. It sounds like something moved. If you can get it to boot to BIOS you may have to poke around that too.
Maybe you messed with the fan when cleaning which caused it to spin slower and thus not hit the threshold the CPU needs on bootup? YOu could try fixing that with BIOS or making sure the fan still spins smoothly and has power.
As a last resort you can also try removing the CMOS battery for 10 seconds and rebooting with it placed back in.
This is my guess.. The fan either got unplugged or de-dusting it killed it - which is not uncommon.
I made sure to block the fan when dusting it so as not to give it excessive torque. It spins afaik
