sqwint

To any computer experts out there, can you help?
The computer is only powering up the fans when switched on with no hard drive activity at all. Have checked and replaced the power supply and there was no difference, and at the moment, I have taken the hard drive out and put in another machine as a slave drive. This drive appears to be working ok with full access to the files.

Any suggestions?

Mark

mike1210

have you tired safe mode, may need to run a repair, are you on xp?

Agressive

try removing the memory, sometimes faulty memory can cause this.


Can you boot into this bios?

jpor

iTrader: (1)

Second that about the RAM. If you have 2 sticks. Take both out and put one in at a time.

Either that, or if you have added anything new recently in a PCI slot? If so remove that and try powering up.

sqwint

I'll try the ram idea. Nothing has been added. Basically was working fine last night, powered down, and now just the fans! Is there a way to force a bios boot? As it stands at the moment, the machine appears to be dead!
Cheers for the hints so far
Mark

Kieran_Burns

iTrader: (1)

are you getting a series of beeps when powering up?

If so count them and do a search on google for the fault

sqwint

Hi Thanks for the bleeps bit, but there are none. Just the quite hum of the fans!

I trying the ram this afternoon so an update then. Cheers for the help

sqwint

Right some weird things occuring. I put the hard drive back into the machine and booted up just to see if it would work before removing the ram, and it did! However it is not all rosy, as after rebooting a couple of times after running a disk defrag to check for bad sectors etc it has stopped working again. Dammit!
I have tried removing the ram individually, and swapping sockets. I have tried each combination of ram in each socket, but to no avail.

Wondering if the boot sector of the hard drive is failing? as it works as a slave ok, but dodgy when working as a master?

back to the original question, any ideas?

Mark

warrenm2

motherboard is knackered

MJW

If the machine is not even booting to the BIOS then I doubt it's the hard drive that's at fault. As above, it sounds like the motherboard is on its way out

kelvin

Agree, sounds very much like a motherboard.

The only alternative I can think of is that both sticks of RAM may have errors on them. Not entirely unfeasible given recent thunderstorms - is your PC surge protected?

Download this to a CD and boot from it (make sure you download the iso version and use burn it correctly). It will scan your RAM modules for errors which will rule that out (or not) once and for all. Alternatively, try memory from a different machine that you know is working.

K.