Following on from this excellent post:

https://forum.lowyat.net/index.php?showtopi...7&hl=transplant


I have three of these Dell Vostro 220S machines which all died at about year 3-4 with drooping power supplies. There must be a mass of these machines out there with the same problem. They present as dead hard drives, because previously working machines suddenly boot saying there is no boot medium and the hard disk can't be detected. In fact, the hard drives and everything else are just fine, its a faulty power supply.

Anyway, getting one of the required Dell SFX supplies for such an old machine didn't thrill me, so I wanted to transplant the systems into a couple of old cases I had sitting around. Did a quick search on the net, not a lot of into on these motherboards, but the excellent how-to in the link above got me most of the way there (thanks Maevox!!)

On my systems I had a couple of additional challenges not covered by the original how-to

1) At boot the system would error because I didn't connect the 'system fan'
2) I didn't want to use front panel audio, so I also got a boot error about the audio
3) I couldn't get the machine to turn off using the power switch when I followed the standard intel front panel wiring (like here: http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/.../CS-009016.htm)


1) System Fan

I couldn't find an elegant solution to this despite a lot of searching around. It should be noted that the 'ignore errors' option usually found in the bios is not present in the dell version, one has to press F1 each boot ... not nice. After I'd spent as much time as I was willing fooling around with web searches and random jumper settings on the board I gave up and stripped the original fan out of the vostro and mounted it in a random secure location inside my new case. I'd rather not do this as I like quiet computing, but this fan is pretty quiet so-be-it ...


2) Front Panel Audio

Maevox led me to the right solution here. To circumvent the system error for the unused front panel USB headers Maevox suggests putting a jumper on pins 8-10 of the USB header. The solution to the front panel audio is similar, jumper pins 2-4 and the system will no longer complain at boot about no audio connector


3) Power Switch won't turn off the machine.

Dell has some funny business going on here. The Vostro 220S case doesn't come with a reset switch. Originally I set up the new case switches per the intel standard (http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/CS-009016.htm). This appeared to work at first, the power switch turns on the machine and the reset switch resets the machine as you'd expect. However, pressing or press-hold the power switch doesn't turn off power on these motherboards.

This annoyed me because I put all my machines in shelving and rear access is a PITA. After a -lot- more web searching I came across a post (which I've now lost and can't find for the life of me) that suggested using front panel header pins 5-6 (instead of 6-8) power power on/off - yay! Yes, indeed, this works, the machine powers on and off with the power switch now. Unfortunately I was not able to find a header pin combination which re-enabled the reset switch .... so that doesn't work, but its less of a loss for me than no power off.

Hope this helps someone

This post has been edited by Moopere: Dec 2 2013, 04:22 PM