Powerspec G502 unresponsive

mkentburel

I restore old computers. A friend gave me a Powerspec G502. I don't have anything but the hardware. The motherboard says it is a ASRock B450 Pro4. I found the manual for that motherboard. I have attached the mouse and keyboard via USB. I have attached a monitor via HDMI. This machine has 2 x 8GB DDR4 memory. The only storage attached is a 30GB SSD. (I know this is inadequate. I'm just trying to determine if the machine works. Then I'll buy a better HD.)

The machine is mostly unresponsive. When I power it on, the fans spin up and the LED on the fans light but I get nothing on the monitor most of the time. Occasionally, I power it on and press F2 repeatedly and I see the bios on the monitor. But I only see it 1 out of 10 attempts to power it on.

How do I diagnose this issue? I found an update BIOS for this motherboard but it requires a thumb drive formatted as FAT32. How do I create the right kind of thumb drive with Windows 11?

Thanks in advance.