Dead PC - not booting.

[NorthernBloke]

I have a friends PC (tell me about it)

any way when I switch on the power light comes on. Both power supply and CPU fans come on. Hard Drive light comes on and it spins for a couple of seconds. Then nothing - no beeps, no display

Are there any simple steps to check MotherBoard and other hardware without a complete strip/rebuild.
Have I missed the problem?

cheers for any pointers - N'Bloke

As a wise man once said "Who put that there?"

[Murf]

I would take the following steps.

1. Disconnect everything but the floppy drive and the monitor. Use a boot disk, see if it boots to the floppy. If not then

2. Take out all the memory but leave one stick in, try rebooting to the boot disk, switch memory trying one at a time -could be defective memory.

3. If you can get it to boot to the floppy, you now know the mobo and monitor is OK.

4. If it won't boot at all, then I would suspect the memory.

5. If it does boot to the floppy, then hook up the hard drive and reboot and get into CMOS (SETUP), do an autodetect of the drives, then see if it will boot from the hard drive.

Since you have power, hear the HDD spin up, I really suspect memory or possibly the monitor itself. If you have access to another monitor try it.

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Murf

Visit-Murf's Windows Garage

But if it ain't broke - "Break It" - So we can help fix it!

[NorthernBloke]

Yep - it was the memory chips.
They are OK if I swap the slots round (?) - I though memory problems produced BIOS beeps ?

thanks, and cheerio

[Murf]

Most "BEEPS" are due to Video Problems. One way to test memory is (if you can) boot into SAFE MODE the the XMS (Himem) memory program kicks in and if memory is bad it will tell you, not always reliable though.

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Murf

Visit-Murf's Windows Garage

But if it ain't broke - "Break It" - So we can help fix it!