bodge job: chassis intrusion switch
A local business recently retired its elderly Xeon server, replacing it with something a little more powerful; the Xeon was repurposed as a normal desktop PC, with a new copy of XP Pro and all. The guy who was to get it asked us to install a sound card, so we did that.
And then it stopped working, saying we’d triggered the chassis intrusion alarm. On most computers, you’d go “oh, okay, that’s cool”, hit F1, and go about your business.
Not so with a server based on an ASUS NCLV-DA. This board yanks on the air-raid siren, barks at its own barking, and thumbs its nose at you if you take the side off the case. It refuses to boot until you reset the CMOS, which of course wipes out the clock and other settings.
At least one other unlucky tech had come across this problem before me; someone’d stickytaped the switch down, so it wouldn’t trigger if the case side came off. This had served well until today, when the tape let go and the motherboard went into panic mode in front of me.
I had a more permanent solution up my sleeve: I stuck a jumper across the intrusion sensor pins on the board, effectively closing the circuit and cutting the little switch and its ever-so-thin wires out of the loop entirely.