System Startup Failure

[Gaim Mastr]

Well, it finally happened. Something on my 4-year old system died. :(:

Fortunately, it's not the only system I own, but the data on the hard drive is worth a fair amount of time and expense to retrieve before tossing the whole shebang (monitor & all) into the trash.

I was playing a little Call of Duty to pass a few spare minutes when the screen froze with a constant high-pitched tone. As usual, I held the power button in on the case to shut it off the hard way. Upon turning the power back on the symptoms of death became evident.

The lights on the two optical drives light up as the system checks for disks upon startup, as per usual. However, the floppy and hard drives are no longer being accessed at all.

The floppy drive light doesn't go on, nor does it spin. Tried putting an emergency boot disk into the drive, but nothing happened.

The hard drive light goes on, but stays constant (as opposed to flickering while the drive is being accessed) for about 30 seconds then shuts off. I don't hear the drive moving at all.

I've tried to start up in the BIOS, but that doesn't work. Tried an emergency boot disk in the optical drives, but that doesn't work either.

The system will remain on until I hold in the power button to do the old hard shutoff. But it just doesn't access anything.

Also, it doesn't seem to be sending any signals to the monitor, as the monitor goes into it's factory hibernation mode after about 30 seconds or so. And if I leave the monitor on while I shut off and turn on the system, it remains in hibernation like no signal at all is being sent to it from the system.


So I'm wondering what the likely causes are to this problem.

Since the startup routine seems to stop at the floppy and/or hard drives, and since all the info is stored on the hard drive, do you think my hard drive has just finally died ??

Or, considering the problems with the two drives and monitor signal, do you think it's something wrong with the mother board ??

As usual, I've checked all of the cables and such. No viruses or spyware. Hard drive had several gigs of fully defragged space left.

Is it possible that some sort of fuse or lithium battery has failed ??

I'm hoping to get some educated guesses before I start buying replacement parts or paying someone to try and retrieve the data from my HD.

If my HD has failed due to a fried circuit or bad bushings, is it relatively easy to remove the disk and put it into another HD to get to the data ??

[RHooks]

You never get any video? Even the DOS looking startup screens before Windows loads?

[Ojnod]

Is it possible that some sort of fuse or lithium battery has failed ??
If it was something like the CMOS battery failing you would not have a problem like that, the problem would be that your BIOS settings would be reset everytime you boot up.

Since the startup routine seems to stop at the floppy and/or hard drives, and since all the info is stored on the hard drive, do you think my hard drive has just finally died ??

If you could not boot to floppy or optical drives that doesnt sound right.



If my HD has failed due to a fried circuit or bad bushings, is it relatively easy to remove the disk and put it into another HD to get to the data ??

Uhh that can be VERY expensive, so unless it is a lot of un-backed up legal documents, I would not bother.

Or, considering the problems with the two drives and monitor signal, do you think it's something wrong with the mother board ??

Sounds like motherboard, ram or processor to me. It is really guess and check when it comes down to finding which one of those is messed up. The only way to tell is to cross-check each part. Try putting the RAM in a known working system, then the processor, if they both work, your motherboard is fried. You may be able to borrow some testing equipment from your local repair shop (if they use computers in the boondocks).

[Ojnod]

Wait, so you can get into BIOS? In that case that probably rules out the motherboard.

[Gaim Mastr]

You never get any video? Even the DOS looking startup screens before Windows loads?


Wait, so you can get into BIOS? In that case that probably rules out the motherboard.


Well, since no signal seems to be sent to the monitor, I can't actually confirm or deny if the system makes it into either the DOS screen or the BIOS screen.

But since DOS is stored on the HD, and since the HD makes no noise or action like it is spinning or being accessed, I suspect it's likely that the DOS screens never load.

[RHooks]

Take out video card and re-seat carefully. Then try to boot again. It's unlikely there is anything wrong with hard drive.

[DanTheManPR]

This sounds exactly like what happened to my old system. One day, it just wouldn't boot; it would turn on, the drives lights would flicker alittle, and that was it. No video signal either. Fortunately, none of my drives were harmed - I just put the HD on another computer, and it worked fine. Although I never could quite figure out what happened, I suspect the mobo died.

So anyway, I think you have a bad mobo. I also think everything else is fine.

I would recomend going a little farther than Rhooks suggests - take out all the PCI cards and RAM, disconnect you're drives, then take out and reinsert the video card. If it doesn't boot, then you're mobo is probably dead.

[RHooks]

Still could be a dead MB. The symptoms you describe are those you get when mother board is shorting out on something. Could be loose screw, loose card, loose anything. Also can't rule out bad PS.

[RangerRick]

Do you get any beeps when you start the system up? If you do, try to determine the beeping sequence. I do not recall if the beeping sequence is the same for all mobo's or if they are different. Mr. N has mentioned that in the past. Describing the symtems, I would say it is either the memory, mobo or cpu.
One other thought, have you tried reseating reseating everything? If not, do that and see what happens.
Here's another also. Does the onboard mobo chipset controller(via,ami, etc) have a heatsink and/or fan on it? My daughter had a similar problem, and I found that the fan/heatsink assembly on top of the chip somehow was not seated correctly. I pushed on the 2 lock down tabs, and the system booted up ok.

[Mr. Natural]

It will take some time to troubleshoot, but I'm guessing possibly a bad power supply. Also the power supply may have done something to the motherboard or the bios when it went. The good news is it sounds like your hardrive with all the data on it should be recoverable. Take the hard drive out and make sure the pin is on the correct master/slave setting and hook it up into another pc. Boom, data is accessible.

I'm having a lot of 4-5 year old soyo motherboards going out right now. I don't have time to troubleshoot the problems, but they exhibit similar symptoms that you describe. Some I've been able to get working temporarily by replacing the power supply. Others though simply won't work. Fortunately I pull the HD and the data is good on the drive.

[Gaim Mastr]

Thanks for the info guys. I'll try troubleshooting as you all mentioned later on. And good news on that HD data.

Right now I'm actually pricing low-end MB, CPU, RAM and power supply.

I was just going toss the whole thing. But I figured that I have some older games and such that will one day not work on my newer systems as I keep upgrading them. So I think I'll keep an 'older' low-end system around for just that purpose.

Off hand, I'm thinking of picking up an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.8 GHz Thoroughbred core) (266MHz FSB). Possibly an ASUS A7V8X-X motherboard to go with it.

That should bring that old system up to a little over twice as fast/powerful as it was, yet still not have any problems playing games like TLJ, Baldur's Gate, etc. I'm just not too keen on those CPU speed decreasing utilities for playing old games on newer/hotter systems.

[0x64657200 0x6A61636B616C00]

EDIT: See, this is what happens when I start to type a respnose, get sucked into an impromptu meeting and don't bother to refresh before submitting said response

What kind of motherboard / system is it?

Does it make any serie(s) of beeping noises?

Were it RAM / Proc you would most likely not even be getting a post in the hard-drives.

[Bruenor]

This recently happened with my wife's PC too.

No beeping, no notice of anything wrong, just no booting and no signal to the monitor. Thankfully, MSI mobo's come with a handy D-Bracket which you can plug into the PCI slot and uses a combination of lights to troubleshoot your system, even if nothing appears on the screen. In her case, the trouble was the CPU went bad.

In reality, it is more than likely one of, or a combination of the mobo, RAM or CPU. The BIOS uses the CPU and RAM first, and if neither of those are there, then you are going nowhere fast. It won't boot, it won't send a signal to the MOBO, it won't start the hard drives spinning, nothing.

[Bruenor]

Grrrr!

GenX butt's in front of me. Damn pushy Germans :p:

[0x64657200 0x6A61636B616C00]

I was just going toss the whole thing. But I figured that I have some older games and such that will one day not work on my newer systems as I keep upgrading them. So I think I'll keep an 'older' low-end system around for just that purpose.

Off hand, I'm thinking of picking up an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.8 GHz Thoroughbred core) (266MHz FSB). Possibly an ASUS A7V8X-X motherboard to go with it.


You really don't need to do that at all. BG1 plays just fine on my 3.4ghz based system as does Grim Fandango, Blade Runner, X-Wing Alliance and a host of other early 90's games. I've even fired up Curse of Monkey Island!

You should never have to speed step a processor to run an application of any type. I'll save the long drawn out geek explanation, but honest to goodness, that's a fallacy. :)

[Ojnod]

ASUS A7V8X-X

Avoid that like the plague...how about a Shuttle A35N-Ultra or something of the like?

[Gaim Mastr]

The system is my old Compaq. CPU= 900MHz Athlon, MB= some 100MHz, RAM= 512Mb PC100, Audio= Sound Blaster 16 PCI, Video= GeForce Ti200, OS= WinME, faded keyboard.

Basically it's just able to play some of those older games at mid to high settings.

No beeps or noises at startup. But then again, it never did make any noises at startup.

As you can see by the specks, if the CPU or MB is bad, I'm not too pumped about installing the same kinds again. As for the RAM, it's probably almost as much for a stick of that PC100 as it is for a stick of new PC2700.

So I figured that for $268 (all from NewEgg.com), it'd be worth it to give that old system a significant upgrade of the CPU, MB, RAM and a new 400 Watt power supply.

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2200+ w/heatsink & fan = $67 (free shipping)
MB: ASUS A7V8X-X = $59 (free shipping)
RAM: Corsair 512MB DDR333 PC-2700 = $88 (free shipping)
PSU: Antec P4 ATX12V 400W = $48 ($6 shipping)

All of those components, including the A7V8X-X, got high marks from Toms Hardware. I think it's the A7N8X board that had problems. I think I'd read that the nForce2 chipsets had some minor performance issues/problems.

Then I'll probably keep my eye open for a used GeForce4 Ti4200 and half-way decent sound card to toss into it to totally round off the upgrade (additional case fans not withstanding).

All things considered, that WinME is a big problem. The memory leak causes all games and programs to run slower and slower until they eventually freeze, needing a system reboot to get going again. I was wanting to put WinXP Pro in there, but at $300, it's hard to justify it.

[RangerRick]

Hey Gaim,

I have a unopened box of WinXP pro retail for sale if you're interested.

The price is 110.00. I already have XP pro and do not ned this one.

[0x64657200 0x6A61636B616C00]

Or, unless it's a hurry, I could offer him one up at my discount when my company store spending limit resets at the end of June.

[DanTheManPR]

There's hardly a difference between XP pro and home anyway.

[Tom Servo]

I'm at school so I don't have time to check prices, but maybe you should try going up a bit in your CPU? With Athlons, there are very small increments in prices to increase performance (to a degree) you could end up paying not much more for a 2500+ or a 2600+.

[Gaim Mastr]

Thanks for the offers !!

If it's alright, I'll let you guys know after this Memorial weekend. I'm going to take the weekend to mull over what I'm definitely going to do. Like Tom Servo mentioned, I might just go with the Athlon XP 2700+, since it has a 333MHz FSB that will match the board and RAM.