PC will not boot

[andyfen]

Hi Guys
PC1 would not boot. Had been working fine for years, hadn't changed anything lately. The fans came on, HDD activity light came on solid, could feel HDD spinning, no beeps, nothing on monitor.

I had another working PC with same motherboard a PC Chips M848ALU (AMD) which I'll call PC2.

I tried putting the HDD from PC1 into PC2 and it booted up fine.

I removed all unnecessary cards and cables from PC1 - did not work.
I tried:
HDD from PC2 in PC1 - PC1 did not work.
graphics card from PC2 in PC1 - did not work.
ram from PC2 in PC1 - did not work.
processor from PC2 in PC1 - did not work.
mobo from PC2 - did not work.
a new PSU - PC1 did not work.
IDE cable - PC1 did not work.
monitor from PC2 on PC1 - did not work.
monitor cable from PC2 in PC1 - did not work.
Clear CMOS - did not work.

Then I put PC2 back together, now that does not work! HDD activity light on solid.

Tried all the above on this machine - did not work.

What am I missing?

 

[Cinders]

Well I can guess. PC1 had two damanged/broken parts. The first was the PSU. The second was the motherboard. The broken PSU fried the motherboard on PC1. When you moved the motherboard from PC2 to PC1 you also fried that motherboard. Now you have two broken computers needing hard to find parts.

They aren't Emachines are they? How old are your computers? What motherboards are they built on? What processors did they run? What type of memory did they use? How much memory did they have? What did you use them for? Do you think you may need a faster computer?

 

[pdyckman@comcas]

If you put HDD from PC1 back into #2 will it work again? At this point you would be happy to have at least one of your machines back. If you have a program disc, put a hard drive in PC2 and reinstall Windows and use that as your system. The only thing that you didn't test is the motherboard from PC1. It seems that PC2 is at least reliable (was) and with a fresh install should serve you fine. Good Luck, it's a deep problem.

 

[Chaky]

If the HDD is IDE, there is a chance of accidently plugginig the IDE cable upside-down. That would cause solid HDD led on (but no HDD spinning), no video feedback, no POST beeps.

 

[andyfen]

Thanks everyone.

Cinders may well be right that problem on PC1 has fried something on PC2.

Not emachines, self-built 3 - 4 years ago ish. Mobo's as above, sempron processors, 1 mb Kingston 2700 ram, I don't need a faster PC

I remebered an identical problem years ago where a machine would not load Bios and in that instance it was a flat Mobo battery - on a new mobo! I've tried replacing batteries to no avail.

Anyone know the minimum voltage requirement for a CR2032 3v mobo battery to do its job? Mine measure 3.1v.

Pdykman - No - HDD from 1 to 2 does not work, bios is not even loading!

Chaky - Unfortunately IDE cable is not upside down - it/they won't go that way due to design. ! I tried it with no HDD & no ram - still no bios.

Have just noticed HDD light not now solid. HDD's are definately spinning up.

 

[andyfen]

I have now put my HDDs into an HP Pavillion a210, Intel celeron 2200.

I copied the Mobo drivers onto a usb pen drive before removing the original HP HDD.

I can boot up and windows tries to load but halfway through loading drivers it reboots.

Same in safe mode.

It is trying to find drivers that aren't on the boot HDD. How can I load the drivers from the pen drive? Or get safe mode to load and fix it from there?

Mobo = MS-6577 V2.1
Intel 8280 1DB/DBM
Network = Realtek RTL 8139
Realtek AC97 Audio

I have fitted my radeon 9550 and selected AGP in bios. so the graphics drivers should be OK.

Can I put the HP HDD back in - together with my boot drive (MBD) set as slave - then somehow get the required drivers into windows system on MBD?

 

[resu]

i had the same mobo as you on a 4 yo build and i got the exact same problem .. turned out it was the mobo itself which had broke .. which was annoying as i bought an agp 7800 to use in it as i thought the gfx card had broken..

oh well i ended up just building a new machine
and ill egt round to fixing my old one sooner or later