CPU/Mobo Repairing a zotac mini pc ... help

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fastapifastdisks

Adept
i have a zotac zbox minipc ci320. was working great for almost 2 years, i decided to replace its thermal paste and forgot to remove its inbuilt cell battery,i think i accidentially shorted it out while cleaning the cpu with iso prop alcohol.Does anyone know where i can get this fixed ? i tried giving it to a local repair shop on lamington road in mumbai but no one seems to be able to figure out what went wrong with it. It wont start, it simply has a redlight on it, pressing the start button does nothing. i have tried changing its power supply unit/adapter but that didnt help.

Does anyone know where i can get it repaired.
 
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Assume start button is faulty, check the pins where it is connected and short them directly to boot.

More thing to try: clear cmos by shorting cmos pins.

Remove and reseat cpu.
 
You need to inspect the board properly maybe you knocked off a capacitor or some other small component? Other than that I don't think you can do much without proper measurements using multimeter.

Also, did you try booting without the CMOS battery (reset CMOS)?
 
Nah, even if you remove the BIOS chip the machine does start/power on but there would be no POST.
In my 15 years of handling computers, dusting/cleaning them I've never removed the CMOS battery ever in the process but I guess ESD damage really depends on the location/environment conditions.
 
rsaeon said:
I read something similar on reddit recently, shorting out something when inserting/removing the CMOS battery

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianGaming/comments/ublwsi

From the comments, the damage that would be done would be to the bios chip. To be honest, it was the first time I've heard of something like this, yours being the second.
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enthusiast29 said:
Nah, even if you remove the BIOS chip the machine does start/power on but there would be no POST.
In my 15 years of handling computers, dusting/cleaning them I've never removed the CMOS battery ever in the process but I guess ESD damage really depends on the location/environment conditions.
Click to expand...
actually what i did was i did not remove the bios battery, i simply took iso prop alcohol to clean the old thermal paste from cpu. I checked it with a multimeter,took it to a local laptop repair tech he said something with cpu power delivery is shorted where the cpu is soldered on the mobo. I had never worked with soc's those that i had replaced thermal paste of were always laptop's which atleast post 2015 have not had a bios battery,and simply ran of the inbuilt/large laptop battery which i always disconnect. I simply assumed the same for this and later realized the bios battery was present. Stupid expensive mistake. Worst thing is i had got this zotact nano box on olx from a goverment recycler for just 3k.Even he does not have stock anymore. Ran pfsense,pihole excellently on esxi 6.7 u3 with support for a ton of usb nic's. was truly the perfect router/firewall.
 
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