My Computer is le Broken

Leonaerd · Post by **Leonaerd** » October 26, 2006, 1:56 pm

It won't even get to the post screen. I didn't alter any settings and the only significant thing I had downloaded was a MAME simulator the previous day. I tried resetting the CMOS and dusting everything nicely but it had no effect.

I'm venturing towards it being a power supply failure, but as I have no other power supply up here there's no way for me to test that hypothesis. Hints? Suggestions?

miir · Post by **miir** » October 26, 2006, 2:09 pm

Hardware troubleshooting 101

disconnect every hard/floppy/optical drive
remove every card (except for video obviously)
remove all but one stick of ram
disconnect every peripheral except the keyboard

If your machine doesn't boot then, you can narrow it down to power supply, motherboard, cpu, video or ram.

Try swapping in different sticks of RAM. Try a different video card if you have one lying around (PCI or whatever). Reseat your CPU...

If it does boot, start reconnectimg your shit one at a time and try booting.

Leonaerd · Post by **Leonaerd** » October 26, 2006, 2:16 pm

K, I'll try that for a while and see what happens.

Leonaerd · Post by **Leonaerd** » October 26, 2006, 2:50 pm

As soon as I took it down to bare bones, it worked. Once I reconnected everything, it still worked. Right now I'm on the "broken" computer. I'd rather something had shown up as broken, because now I still don't know what the problem was.

miir · Post by **miir** » October 26, 2006, 2:57 pm

Leonaerd wrote:As soon as I took it down to bare bones, it worked. Once I reconnected everything, it still worked. Right now I'm on the "broken" computer. I'd rather something had shown up as broken, because now I still don't know what the problem was.

Maybe it was a card/cpu/cable/ram that came loose and needed to be reseated/reconnected.

Do you have a speaker hooked up to the motherboard?
You should beacause you can usually get a good idea of what the problem is by the beep sequence.

Leonaerd · Post by **Leonaerd** » October 26, 2006, 7:22 pm

Maybe it was a card/cpu/cable/ram that came loose and needed to be reseated/reconnected.

No. I made sure of that before I took anything out.

Do you have a speaker hooked up to the motherboard?

Yes. I looked up the beep / number pattern in the Mobo booklet and it was inconclusive.

But since it's still working now, I'm just not going to worry about it for a while.

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » October 26, 2006, 8:22 pm

I used to have something similar to that happen with an old Maxtor drive that was "getting ready" to fail. It would not want to boot for about 30 minutes. I would curse. Eventually it would boot fine for several more weeks.

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » October 26, 2006, 10:28 pm

That could also be PSU; reduced the load and it booted, increased the load and it booted again because everything still had charged capacitors.