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We have a GE HMI and it's about dead. It reboots at random, last random reboot brought the BLUE Screen up - Hardware Failure. CCS-INC is the vendor who makes this product for GE. CCS-INC does not support this motherboard any longer. It's old and out of date.

Our plant is about 4 years old and we have 5 servers with all the same hardware. We have one server in “failing/restart mode” Upon a visual internal inspection I found the motherboard capacitors are leaking and expanding. This was a common problem for DELL Desktops from same time frame. With that said, I am all about the motherboard being on its death bead. I would like to try an economical upgrade considering we have all the software and licenses we paid for and the hardware is the real issue. I have found very little on repairs for the out of date motherboards. It’s a D845GBVL Intel.

It's running WIN2k, Toolbox, and Cimplicity 4.5 package. Ideas or Tips? Anyone else seeing this problem?

Hi,
I had a similar issue last year on my HMI server.
It was the 1500uF capacitors on the motherboard that were bulging or leaking.

Apparently this is a common worldwide problem for these capacitors around that age and they can cause a variety of symptoms including the one you described. Type "1500uF capacitors" into google.

I bought some new capacitors and replaced them on the motherboard and it did the trick. It is a simple job if you are handy with a soldering iron (or know someone who is)

It has been running without issues for 12 months since.

In the meantime I have bought new HMI's and am in the process of installing them.

Hope this helps.
Steve

Dear MarkVI,
We have 8 MKVI servers running on Win2k. So far I have had 1 hard drive failure. We ghost all of our machines yearly. In this case it was a quick repair to replace the hard drive and install the ghost image on the new drive. In your case if you plan to get a new server some image software will not allow you to install an image on new hardware. Not to push any software but Acronis makes an imaging software that will allow you to image your existing machine and install the image on a new machine of your choice. It is also possible to just reinstall all the software as you say, but the time getting a new license code from Cimplicity, rebuilding all your .hmb files etc, I have found the image to be a much quicker and simpler choice.

Hope this helps.

I'm also amazed on this feature - I think only Acronis is able to do that. But I'm a bit skeptical on how they do it. It seems that this feature is limited to certain hardware changes. No?

Dinster, I have not found any limitations on hardware yet, but I haven't used it lots of times yet, only on 2 machine failures so far. But it sure saves time loading software, that's for sure.

There was a company selling very cheap capacitors which were used in just about every type of electronic device you can imagine. I think they went out of business, but yes, the capacitors are everywhere in products from that era. A lot of purchasing agents only asked about price, and didn't want to know *why* they were so cheap.

If you type your board part number into Google, you will get lots of hits from companies which say they can still get that board. On the other hand, you will be spending time and money on an obsolete board which only works with lots of other obsolete components. The CPU, RAM, hard drive, graphics adaptor bus, etc. have all be superseded by new styles. You're going to have problems in future finding things like IDE hard drives (newer ones are all SATA).

You might just consider biting the bullet now and replacing the lot of them.

Motherboard ~ $100
CPU ~ $50 (low end model)
RAM ~ $25 (1 Gig)
Hard drive ~ $100
Graphics board ~ $50 (low end)

Total ~ $325

Your main issue will be to make sure you have all the drivers. One of the unfortunate design features of MS Windows is that drivers are separate from the OS kernel, which means that on its own, MS Windows doesn't even know how to talk to a modern hard drive.

Someone else in another post has suggested imaging the original drive and restoring it onto the new hardware. You can try that, but it doesn't always work if the new hardware isn't the same as the old hardware. Be prepared to do a complete install.