PC wont boot!

[BolshieBastard]

Damn! A pc I have for one of the kids has decided to stop working.

All leads are secure and power is on. It worked fine last night up to being switched off.

Now, I press the start button, power light comes on then there seems to be a 'click, click' sound followed a few seconds later by one beep of probably a second or more (its not the normal 'short' POST beep!).

This beep repeats every couple of seconds. Meanwhile, the monitor shows power, briefly lights up then goes off. Fan is working and HD seems to be spinning.

You cant boot to safe mode or enter BIOS as nothing happens except the above.

There's a green and red LED lit on the base unit (its a bespoke pc so no point posting manufacturer etc)

It hasnt been dropped, moved or kicked (but soon will be if I cant get it sorted!) so nothing should have worked loose.

Any ideas?

[Fred Bloggs]

Look at the mobo manual for what the beep codes mean. If you can't access the mobo bios then the mobo could be knackered (try resetting the bios there should be a way to do that in the mobo manual via a jumper). Otherwise I think the OS is toasted (virus?) or the HD is otherwise screwed. It sounds like the video card is booting OK so my money is on the mobo or HD.

[PAH]

Might be too cold, if there's any of that white stuff where you are. Put it in the oven for 10 mins and see if that fixes it. The clicking could be the PSU or HD not firing up properly.

Otherwise it's the usual suspects:

ram
graphics card
psu (not providing enough power to boot up properly)


First thing I'd check is that no-one's left something in a usb port. Sometimes stops PCs from booting if it's trying to boot from the usb device due to boot priority in the bios!

Try checking the beeps against any related info you can find for the motherboard, used to be a way of diagnosing a problem, and might still be.

If all else fails, there's always the TechGuys down at PC World.

[Fred Bloggs]

You need a page like this-

http://www3.intel.com/support/mother.../cs-010249.htm

Only for your mobo brand. HTH.

[Pondlife]

As PAH said, check there's no USB devices plugged in.

The clicking sound probably means your HD is now only useful as a paperweight, sorry.

Unplug the HD and try a boot disk (eg windows install CD)

HTH

[Board Game Geek]

See if you can boot with something like Ultimate Boot CD which you will need to get from the Internet using another PC.

If this boots, and you don't see your C:\ Drive, you know at the very least that the HDD is broken. (could be other problems as well)

If you cannot boot with UBCD, then I'd suspect mobo, PSU or memory in any combination.

Kids PC ?

Was it internet capable ?

Hmmm...search terms such as "Free Games", "Free Grand Theft Auto", "Free Ringtones", etc tend to lead the naive little 'uns to sites riddled with viruses. Perhaps the MBR of the disk is knackered ?

[bellymonster]

Sounds like a deffo hardware fault of some kind.

Worth reseating the memory modules, they sometimes pop out slightly due to changes in temperature.

Failing that disconnect all disks/CD drives and see if you can get to the BIOS.

[Clippy]

Well, what was it?

[jkoder]

Take her to pieces!

Try booting with minimum hardware.

One stick of ram
All optical drives disconnected.
Any PCI/AGP cards removed.

Another thing to try is a Linux live CD, you can boot without a hard-drive but my guess is this a problem with the PSU or motherboard.

Never easy to debug these, I had one case where the PSU was faulty and it killed the motherboard so when testing with another PC I identified the motherboard as the problem, I bought a new motherboard and the PSU killed that too!

[Bob Dalek]

Sounds like the HDD. Can you test it in another PC?