Bought about 7 years ago, simple little black box Qotom J1900 with 4 Intel gigabit NICs.

Ran it for about 5 years as a robust little router with pfSense. But started having some intermittent issues where wouldn't boot properly.

In 2020, it just failed to boot at all. I gave up on it after a while, but thought I really need a proper router again. Convinced myself that a new MSATA HDD would solve the issue, it has not. It actually was booting via USB when I tested it a few weeks ago to convince myself that the issue was the HDD.

All I get is the BIO splash screen, then the device resets again. I can get into the BIOS using DEL, and can change and save settings. Also tried removing and replacing the BIOS battery, but same issue. I did have it boot into pfSense a few times, but pretty much all other times it just resets immediately after showing the BIOS splash screen.

It doesn't appear to want to boot off the bootable Linux USB image either, which it was doing beofre I purhcased the new HDD; it was showing up an ACPI BIOS error, but I think that's due to the Linux Mint bootable image rather than the cause of the bootloader problem I'm having.

I did a memtest using the USB bootable image, and that came back Pass with no Errors, so looks fine as well.

I'm not sure if it's a flaky power supply or the mohterboard itself? Any advice appreciated, because now I'm considering whether to just cut my losses and buy another AliExpress special or fork out a bit more for a Protectli Vault and hope that's going to be reliable?

I have had mixed results with Protectli Vault devices. I have one that has been running for 4 years with zero problems, one that completely died and one where the video output died. I replaced the one that completely died with another manufacture i.e. cheaper model and so far no problems. It is difficult to determine what might have failed. As an aside the newer Mint 64 bit versions do not seem to want to boot with a non UEFI system. Unfortunately, despite the price of computers of that class I consider them more as appliances and you could spend more time, effort and money trying to fix then to just replace.

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Thanks Michael. That's what I'm thinking too, that even though it seems wasteful, it's not really worth the time and effort worrying about, and hoping whatever I get next lasts longer than this one.

I might offer it for someone that likes to tinker, never know someone may be able to reuse it.