Question : Problem: ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard - troubleshooting help

I have an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard that has been working fine for about 1.5 years.  Today, when I came into my office my PC had shut down during the night and when I tried to reboot, it started the boot process, but locked up at the login prompt.  I entered about two characters of my password and the screen froze.  This occurred several times before I started troubleshooting further.  I tried booting into safe mode, but it stuck on mup.sys and wouldn't finish loading.  I then tried inserting my XP disk and getting to the recovery console and running a checkdisk on my boot drive to see if I had a bad sector.  Still, it was locking up before I could get that far.

I opened the case and found that the nForce4 SLI chipset fan on the board wasn't spinning and one of the screws that held it in place had broken off.  So, it was being held in by one screw and was slightly pushed up from the chipset (not sitting flush since one of the screws broke off).  After pulling out the nForce4 SLI chipset fan, part of the screw was still in the board, which I need to get out.  I'm not sure how to get it out?  Do I have to remove the entire board and try to remove it from the back side?

I'm hoping that the nForce4 SLI fan going out has not caused fatal damage to my board?  I'm not sure it is the fan that was causing the problem or not.  Does this sound like a possible cause of the nForce4 SLI chipset overheating?

I thought I would try and replace the chipset fan first and see if that corrects the problem.  Does anyone know the size and what type of fan I should get to replace the nForce4 SLI chipset fan?

Are there any checks to determine if my board has fried or if it is my boot drive is bad?  I have two SATA drives in a RAID configuration that is running my OS (XP Pro) and all my applications.  I have two other seperate drives that have store all my files.

Answer : Problem: ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard - troubleshooting help

As willcomp noted, going directly to Asus is probably the best way to insure you get exactly the right part.   You can e-mail your request to Asus at http://vip.asus.com/eservice/techserv.aspx
... or call them at 812-282-2787