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System may fail with 176 or 184 POST error - IBM PC300PL


Symptom
The system fails POST with 176 or 184 "System Security" or "Asset Tag failure" error message. The error cannot be corrected through standard BIOS procedures.

Affected configurations
IBM PC 300PL 6862, 6872, and 6892 systems.

Solution
Replace the system board.

Replacing the mainboard is an expensive thing to do. There is an alternative, which only costs about £á0.40 and a few minutes of hard labour. (the hardest part is getting the mainboard out of the case)

The cause of this problem with IBM Netfinity machines is bad capisators (elcos) located above the CPU unit.

Solution:
There are 3 caps, slightly bigger then all other caps on the mainboard. You might see these caps are bulging slightly.

Since we didn't had support by IBM on our server anymore, we decided to try to repair it ourself by replacing the three 560uF/25V caps by two 1000uF/35V caps, whitch we had on stock. Our server works again!

just take a solder iron and remove the 3 caps from the main board.
Then clean the holes (they must be open otherwise you can't put the new caps in).
We used 2 caps of 1000uF because we didn't had 3 caps of 560uF. Put the new caps in, and solder them on the mainboard.

For someone with a little bit of electronics knowlage this is a piece of cake :) The repair is very cheap, took us 2 caps of about £á0.20 and about 10 minutes of hard labour to remove and solder the caps back on.
I've made photos of our elcos we've replaced:




You should only do this when you don't have support on the server from IBM anymore, because I don't think IBM will give any support when they find out you've done anything to the mainboard with a solder iron :)

See also this link:
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?t ... ID=2933150



Patrick from the Netherlands