I bought a new chaintec mother board, Athlon XP2200+ CPU, Power Supply, and 256mb 266mhz DDR memory... to have a fast Linux PC! I went to install them in an ATX case I had from a fried Pentium 2 machine and ran into a problem connecting wires.

Everything is bolted up and good to go except for one thing. The front panel power control cable is not long enough AND has one of the pinholes plugged in such a way that I cannot plug it into my motherboard. However, my powersupply has a hard power switch on it, so maybe this can save me from buying a new case.

Is there a way to not use front panel power control and LED lights, and just rely on the hard power switch on the power supply? How could I go about doing this... maybe using jumpers or something? Would this damage my mother board in anyway?

Please tell me I don't need to buy a new case!

~Garrett

You will need at least the front power thing, Splice into the wire, then conect it o your mobo.

-Joey

I can splice and extend the wire (being an amp tech means I'm pretty good with raw electronics), but how do I connect that to the mobo... soldering might not be a good idea on the mobo...

Will the other unconnected pins cause harm to my mobo?

Thanks,
Garrett

Upon further investigation, my case has PWR LED, PWR Switch, HD LED, Reset Switch. It uses a 16 pin connector, and my motherboard uses a standard 20pin connector. Is there maybe an adaptor to convert them that would eliminate soldering stuff to my mobo? Thanks,

Garrett

Find any old shity atx case and take the conecters from the leds and switches, cut off the 16 pin thing and soder the wires into the connecters then plug them into the the mobo

I'll keep my eye out for cases. For now I'll try and rig something up. I assume it would be safe to just jumper it with a set of probes/screwdriver in order to boot it and get linux going... once I get linux going I won't need to turn it off.

Say I just short it with a screw driver... being careful not to hit the wrong pins... when linux says to power off, would it be safe to use the hard switch, or would I have to short the mobo pins again (soft-off)?

Thanks!

That would be very safe, I have to do that on my 450MH/z box

another sulution might be to check your bios my bios has a keyboard shortcut to turn it on its ctrl-alt-f1 on mine. check that out see if it would work

yeah my baord is a really good one w/nvidia nforce2 400 chipset and I remember reading that. I wasn't sure by what they meant, but I will try right now!

Thanks,
Garrett

I got the hotley setup, works like a charm. Thanks SOO much!

Garrett