Why won't my Pc Boot up

mrs2000

I have recently been having problems with my Compaq Presario Pc.

It is just over a year old and the problem is when I turn it on I can hear the fans and the cd drive light kicks in but the Hard drive does not, normally a little orange light comes on.

I have taken my computer into work for an It technician to have a look and it always booted up for him so he did some checks and said everything was fine, but when I got it home I continued having the same problems.
Again I took it in to him with my Monitor but like before always booted up for him. the only problem he could think of was the power, I used to run my Pc and monitor from a surge protected Y cable which was plugged into a surge protected extension lead, I have since changed this to a single lead for computer and monitor from a different wall socket, this worked for one day then I continued having problems.
I have since changed the power pack in the computer but still having problems. The It technician seems to think it is the motherboard and advised me to buy a new pc which I don't really want to do after only having this one for one year
Does anybody have any suggestions.

DevCoder

Do you know what the motherboard is?

Get CPUID from http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html and run it and post the motherboard (main board) info.

Fedz

Strangely I've had this recurring problem but, my Compaq Presario is about 5 yrs old!

I have 2 HDs one with WinXP & other has Ubuntu Linux what I did when the PC decided to boot I booted into Ubuntu as that's my primary drive & did a grub update & it hasn't happened since (months ago)

This used to happen even before I put a 2nd HD with Ubuntu on when I just had the comps default config of Windows.

I thought & was told it was either the power pack, CPU, CPU fan, RAM or basically anything failing but, since the above nowts happened luckily

mrs2000

Motherboard info is
Manufacturer Foxconn
Model 2AAF
Chipset AMD 780G
Southbridge AMD SB700
LPCIO ITE IT8721

BIOS American Megatrends
Version 6.01
Date 23/04/2010

eneville

Fedz wrote: »

I have 2 HDs one with WinXP & other has Ubuntu Linux what I did when the PC decided to boot I booted into Ubuntu as that's my primary drive & did a grub update & it hasn't happened since (months ago)

If running grub-update fixed this, then perhaps if you only have Windows then running fixmbr and/or fixboot might solve it.

waddler_8

I have taken my computer into work for an It technician to have a look and it always booted up for him

That doesn't suggest MBR corruption.

eneville

waddler_8 wrote: »

That doesn't suggest MBR corruption.

Indeed, I'd expect the box to never boot up and to report OS missing or a similar message.

The lack of any sort of boot up makes me wonder if it's getting part way into the OS load and even stranger, another Compaq owner has reported a similar fault, to which replacing grub fixed.

eneville

mrs2000 wrote: »

I have recently been having problems with my Compaq Presario Pc.

It is just over a year old and the problem is when I turn it on I can hear the fans and the cd drive light kicks in but the Hard drive does not, normally a little orange light comes on.
[...]
The It technician seems to think it is the motherboard and advised me to buy a new pc which I don't really want to do after only having this one for one year
Does anybody have any suggestions.

One thing I often do with problems like this is to open up the case and disconnect everything except, cpu, ram and video. Leave the cover off the PC and press the power button, you should see some output on the monitor as it goes through the boot process and finally report that there is no bootable OS available.

If you can confirm that this is working reliably then the next thing to is is reconnect your disks, one at a time. Finally reconnect other bits of hardware that you may have disconnected until you can find the faulty bit.

DevCoder

Most of the time, power up and no beep codes are either

1) Faulty graphics card
2) Incorrect BIOS settings, this includes the internal table the BIOS/CMOS stores of IRQ auto allocations.
3) Bad PSU

If you take the cover off and look at the motherboard then you should see a CR2302 battery

http://www.wholesaleec.com/upload/upimg470%5CLithium-Batteries-1410.jpg

Next to this (or near it) should be some jumpers with "CMOS Reset" or similar

http://hardwaretexpert.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/biosreset1.jpg

Remove the battery and move the jumper from the two pins its on to the other two pin configuration.

Ie if the cmos reset jumper looks like

1 2 3

and the jumper is on 1&2 then put it on 2&3.

Power the machine up, note that it might not actually power up when you press the power switch. This is ok.

Power off (or remove the power lead). Put the jumper back to its original place. Replace the battery and now try re-powering the computer.