2011 Fanuc31i starts to boot up then "Fan Motor1 Stop and Shutdown"

WTF ? Just black screen and that one sentence....reset does nothing, no keys do anything (except off and on). I figured out the problem, fixed it....if I posted that here would you guys have known what it was ?

CPU cooling fan quit working.

KilrB said:

CPU cooling fan quit working.

Click to expand...

Yep...one of the two....tiny little fan...maybe two inch square was not turning, apparently from machine sitting for two years off the grid. Touched the blade with my pocket knife and the tiny thing whirred to life and machine booted up just fine.

Just that in all my career never seen a control refuse to do anything if one of those fans went out..usually they would boot up but give an alarm. Guess the theory by 2011 was harm could come to the CPU if that alarm was not noticed or even during CPU idling while searching for the problem.

Still, it would have been nice of Fanuc to add a few letters, like CPU or control, to the message as my first thoughts were of a fan on the machine itself so I went looking for tripped circuit breakers before it crept into my little brain that the one thing the control would think so important as to lock out boot up completely would be a fan to protect itself.

Had one of our Brother HS-70A wire-edm's do that recently.

The Brother machine operating system runs on top of Linux on those.

After a recent long week-end it would do just as you describe.

Suspecting it had to be the cpu fan because it was occuring during boot-up I opened the back panel and could see that the cpu fan was spinning, but way too slow.

We swapped the fan for a new, presumably better, fan that ran noticeably faster ... but continued to get the same result.

After some judicious "googling" we disabled the fan monitoring function in the BIOS and have had no further recurrence of that problem.