So, my computer more or less shit the bed last week. I was using it, just going to empty the recycle bin, and, poof. It shut down. Puzzled, I tried to boot it back up. It booted, posted, let me go to the BIOS, but... nothing else. It didn't recognize any of my drives. I reseated everything and booted it a few more times. Once or twice it saw the CD drive, but never the hard drives. Most of the time, nothing.
So, I assume it's a problem on the motherboard, with the UDE controller, and I order a new one. I don't have another machine handy at the moment to do a real thorough diagnosis, so I went with my best guess.
Now, I put the new machine together, and... more problems. Most of the time I turn it on, the fans spin, and it even spins up all the drives. But, nothing shows up on the monitor. It SOUNDS like it's booting properly, but, again... nothing. Other than the motherboard, the components are the same. Same drives, proessor, PSU, etc.
Given its spotty performance, I'm thinking it's not a processor issue; after all, it did boot up once or twice, sporadically. And a broken processor wouldn't break halfway, right?
So I'm thinking I've either got a RAM problem or an issue with the power supply. Any thoughts from my fellow W's?
Originally posted by PalpatineW It SOUNDS like it's booting properly, but, again... nothing. Other than the motherboard, the components are the same. Same drives, proessor, PSU, etc.
Have you had a look at your processor? What you describe sounds exactly like when my processor fried a couple of years back. Assuming you don't want to take it to a shop, or you don't have friends with various bits lying around, see if you can find tested, working second hand compatible parts. Swap them in until you pinpoint the problem, then get the real thing.
Bring it down to a minimum number of components to boot it.
I'd try taking everything off of the system except for 1 stick of RAM, CPU, Video Card, and CD-ROM. See if you can boot it off of a bootable CD-ROM. If that fails, try putting the other RAM in and booting it.
Your video card is probably OK because you get video on boot - normally a bad video card will give you beep codes if it is bad. I'm guessing this is also the case with the processor - which makes me believe its probably one of the drives.
If it doesn't boot with the CD-ROM, try it with just one of the hard drives. The odds are that one of your IDE devices is bad. If you had made a recent change, I'd say look at the master/slave settings.
Good luck.
Willful ignorance of science is not commendable. Refusing to learn the difference between a credible source and a shill is criminally stupid.
I've done all the things you've suggested, Guru, to no avail. I'm gonna take it up to my girlfriend's house tomorrow and use her machine for testing purposes while she's at work. I'll let ya know how it turns out.
Ugh, I feel like a retard. Been trying for hours to get Exchange to work with this new update and I can't get it done. Doesn't matter if I use SSL, or even turn it off completely, I can't get anything to sync and don't get error messages on the phone.