OK so it wasn’t the PSU.

I attached the PSU from another machine to my workstation and the problem was the same. The machine powers up immediately, but doesn’t give any visual or aural output, holding in the power switch to turn it off causes the machine to attempt to power down, but instead of turning off, the power just dips and stays on, attempting to start up again without any output.

I removed pretty much all of the components from the board and it was still the same. I moved all of the components to another machine and that machine works fine with them. In fact, for the second time in 24 hours, I’m writing this on a new machine, but this one contains all of the old parts with the exception of the motherboard, CPU and RAM. Arse. I still have all of my files and installation, just that I’ve gone from an AMD XP 2400 (2GHz) with 1GB 333MHz RAM to an old AMD Thunderbird 1200 MHz with 256MB 100MHz RAM; and slower ATA channels and AGP port.

Still, at least I have a machine with my existing installation. I thank your God (I don’t have one) that Linux system disks can be moved from one machine to another without problem unlike fscking Windows. Now just to test the motherboard with different RAM, I don’t have a spare CPU for that board, so if it’s not the memory, then it’s going in the bin. Actually thats a lie. I have a garage full of old P100s and P200s that barely work that I can’t bare to throw away. It will go in ‘the pile’ waiting for me to diagnose the problem and replace the offending part. That could take years with the amount of stuff I have going on…

Anyway, I’m back on my feet. Just slower 😉