Is my hard drive dead?

tru

I used the PC this morning then left it on, came back to it about an hour later and when I moved the mouse the moniter wouldn't come back on. So I reset the PC and it tries to boot up for about 3 seconds, then it goes quiet and every few seconds it beeps. I took the cover off to check nothing had come loose, but it still won't work

Any ideas? Thanks.

Joe_Bloggs

Have you checked your graphics card. They have the shortest slots and tend to get levered out by the chunky video cable, especially when forced against a wall. Check for other cards creeping out of their sockets too.
J_B.

tru

Thanks. I don't know which one the graphics card is, but I've just checked and everything is in the sockets properly.

lyns_2

Hi
I had the same problem 2 weeks ago.
took it to a pc repair shop and they said it needed cleaning £15 .It then worked
1 week later i had a error message come up said windows had been corupted cost me £40 to put right.
I dont know if the problems are linked

Joe_Bloggs

The graphics card would be the one that the monitor was connected to. You may have graphics that are built into the motherboard and hence no card.
Try and find the motherboard manual. The beeps are probably a code to indicate a specific fault. Did you check that the CPU fan was spinning.
Try switching off on the wall/unplug for a few minutes.
Don't let this problem ruin your day, you can rip the guts out of this PC tomorrow.
J_B.

tru

Ah right. It's built into the motherboard then.

I tried switching it off at the wall earlier, it made no difference. There are 2 fans, they're both working. The pc is second-hand so I don't have a manual. I'll look it up on google in the morning.

I'm only stressing because this morning I loaded 500 pics on for work, I hope I haven't lost them, I need them tomorrow :-/

Also my brother's wedding pics are on there, not the official ones but would still love to keep them

Thanks for your help so far J_B

Thanks to Lyns too

NellyLock

im guessing it aint the hard drive. more likely to be ram/processor or something else...not that thats much help to you. there are ways of gettin the data off the hard drive if you have a spare/another pc that you can open up and copy too

Joe_Bloggs

Try and switch the power of at the wall socket rather than unplug. This way the case will be earthed and the motherboard will not have standby power.
You don't need a hard drive to boot the system. If it has valuable stuff on it then disconnect it from the motherboard and unplug the four pin power cable from the drive .Note where things went and which way round they were. You could take the hard disk away to another PC and access the contents as a slave or a secondary drive .
Unplug things you don't need ie anything USB, mouse, CD rom networking and, sound cards.
If it boots now then it was something you took out that was at fault. If it does not boot then their is only the processor, motherboard and memory left.
Let's hope it does a POST and looks for things to boot from.
J_B.
PS.
Do not connect the flexible ribbon cable between the motherboard and drive without connecting the four pin power connector to the drive. Failure to make the power connection will prevent the system from posting, as will getting the polarity of ribbon connector wrong at either end. Look for tears inthese cables they are easily snagged on sharp edges.

tru

Thanks J_B, I'll try that now

tru

The only thing I haven't done is to try the hard drive in another pc, will do that in a mo.
I've only just noticed, the motherboard has a LED display, it says 'C1' now, when it was working properly it said either 'F1' or 'FF' (can't remember which). I searched for an online manual but couldn't find one, the motherboard is VIA VT 8233.

Joe_Bloggs

Alas the VIA VT 8223 is a Southbridge. VIA make lots of chipsets and sell them to motherboard manufacturers.
You need to look for more letters and numbers on the board surface to ID the board.
Good luck with the hard disk.
J_B.