Calling all techies - dead PC diagnosis!

PhiL_P_3

U tried booting the pc outside of the case on an anti-static mat?

I haven't actually. Funnily enough a few years back I was building a PC for a friend and upon completion it wouldn't boot. Tried numerous things and eventually sent it back to the internet supplier as faulty. They tested it and sent it back to me saying it had tested fine. *Eventually* I traced the fault to the fact that the motherboard was shorting on the case by, you guessed it, booting the PC with the motherboard outside of the case on an anti-static mat (or to be more accurante, the bubble-wrap it came in)!

It had crossed my mind to try this, although since the PC has been running fine for well over a year it would be odd if it has started shorting now for no obvious reason, though stranger things have happened I guess..

Again thanks to everyone for your suggestions! ;D

PhiL_P_3

I would have asked whether you have overclocked any of the components in the bios as over-clocking the memory would stop the machine from posting, but seeing how you have reset the cmos this would have cleared all settings.

No, it was not overclocked.

Before the machine stopped working did you notice the PC shutting down, or alarm, due to components exceeding temperature thresholds? Namely the CPU? Usually they are set within the Bios where if the CPU exceeds 70C, or something, it would issue warning beeps before shutting down.

No, nothing like this occured, it simply wouldn't start one day.

You must have a mate who could test the CPU for you? What's the spec of it?

It's an Abit KT7A RAID Socket A motherboard with an AMD Athlon 1Ghz CPU, 2x256MB 133Mhz CL2 DIMMs and an nVidia GeForce DDR 32MB graphics card.

Malestrom

It's an Abit KT7A RAID Socket A motherboard with an AMD Athlon 1Ghz CPU, 2x256MB 133Mhz CL2 DIMMs and an nVidia GeForce DDR 32MB graphics card.

Could be a good excuse for 'upgrade-time'....thats if you need an excuse in your house :-/ ;D

PhiL_P_3

Could be a good excuse for 'upgrade-time'....thats if you need an excuse in your house  :-/ ;D

I would agree but it's my sister's family PC, they're on a tight budget and to be honest it serves their needs fine (when it works!). It's actually mostly comprised of hand-me-down components from me!

Thankfully my own PC is just a touch higher-spec than this!

PhiL_P_3

Right the next thing I'm going to try is booting the PC with the motherboard out of the case, as suggested by StrikeEagle, then if that still fails I'm gonna take the plunge and order a replacement board.

Should be able to pick up a decent SoA board from Dabs or similar for ~£30 if I go for a used or returned item, though I'll have to make sure it supports SDRAM which could be a little trickier..

Toxteth_OGrady

Just a thought before you splash out - have you tried a different CMOS battery ???

8)

TOG

gm_xone

Got a PC which refuses to POST - powers up (lights on, fans and hard disk spinning) but no signal is sent to the monitor. Also there are no beeps from the motherboard

My brother asked me to look at his pc recently with the same problem as you describe.

After spending some time trying a new graphics card, changing the psu and even trying a different monitor, I was no further forward.

However I realised it was a MSI motherboard for which there is a diagnostic attachment (D-Bracket 2).
Knowing I had one of these for my own motherboard, I thought I'd try connecting it up to see if it could get to the root of the problem.

When the pc was booted up, one of the four LEDs was glowing red. According to the motherboard manual there was a fault initializing the floppy drive and controller. I checked the connections to the board and the drive then re-booted. Still no joy, so I replaced the ribbon cable and re-booted again.

Hey presto! Problem solved. ;D
It's incredible that something so simple had me looking in the wrong place for a solution!
The computer is still working fine with no further problems.

Hope you have the same success

PhiL_P_3

Just a thought before you splash out - have you tried a different CMOS battery  ???
TOG

No, since if I recall correctly from past experience if the CMOS battery is dead the PC will still POST using the default CMOS settings and possibly will display a warning message..

Good idea though, may give it a go at the same time as I try to boot with the board out of the case (which I can't try til tonight as I'm working today ).

PhiL_P_3

Well none of the suggestions worked

So now I need to source a replacement motherboard. After taking a quick look it's not going to be so easy to find a board that still supports 133Mhz SDRAM, suspect eBay may be my best bet. :-/

One thing that did concern me when I tested the motherboard outside the case is that I discovered the CPU isn't getting hot, or even warm, at power-up. Whether this is simply due to the motherboard failure, or also indicates a problem with the CPU, I really don't know.. ???

StrikeEagle

What is the cpu? A PII?

They really dont get hot at all.