After around 5 years I decided to do some cleanups 🙂
Couple years server was staying in the kitchen, so it wasn’t easy to clean it.
It was filled with a dust mixed with something like oil/fats. I regret that I didn’t take all the photos, but it was disgusting 🙂 It took around 2 hours to clean it, because I was disassembling everything, even PSU and hotswap baskets. I was forced to wipe everything with a rag and isopropyl alchohol.
After successful cleanup I assembled it, turned it on and… nothing, fans were spinning, but nothing more…
After few additional hours of tests and investigations a found broken component around multicontroller chip. Using my logic I understood that it’s not a capacitor or pull-up/down resistor and I decided to short it and try to power server up.
Success! I almost buried this motherboard, but finally found what was the problem. But a drop of solder doesn’t look like a good solution and I started searching schematics, there is no service docs for this board, but some for other boards with IT8613E:
Found, yep, there should be a ferrite bead, like I thought.
I don’t have 0402 ferrites/inductors so I soldered 0805 blm21:
It’s alive. Fuck such cleanings, so much time spent 🙂 Relocated server from kitchen to another room 🙂
