computer sadness

egan.

egan.

daylightdies.com
Dec 28, 2002
5,431
12
38
NorCal
www.daylightdies.com
Hey guys. One of my old computers (pentium 4) froze today. When I rebooted the fans, HDs and optical drives are all spinning up but I never get a display or power to my kbd or mouse. No beeps...No boot.

I tried each stick of ram on it's own to see if that was the issue. No luck.
I tried a different video card. No luck.

So, any thoughts? It comes down to mobo, psu or cpu at this point I suppose. The issue for me is that the machine is too old to dump a bunch of $ into but useful enough that I'd hate to abandon it all together. Thoughts?
 
egan. said:
Hey guys. One of my old computers (pentium 4) froze today. When I rebooted the fans, HDs and optical drives are all spinning up but I never get a display or power to my kbd or mouse. No beeps...No boot.

I tried each stick of ram on it's own to see if that was the issue. No luck.
I tried a different video card. No luck.

So, any thoughts? It comes down to mobo, psu or cpu at this point I suppose. The issue for me is that the machine is too old to dump a bunch of $ into but useful enough that I'd hate to abandon it all together. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

I would rule out the cpu and ram, if it's not even finishing POST than the MOBO or something else is fucked.

I would throw a known working PS and start from there. Also, jump the board to reset the bios.
 
This is typical of a loose bios.
Press down gently on the bios, then try to start it again.
 
Egan, most likely is that the bios chip on the board has snuffed it completely from the sounds of it. You could save yourself trouble shooting hassle by picking up a direct swap off of ebay or something if you were lucky. Good advice from Wolfe and Notuern too, give that a go.
 
Haha. Well, I went to try the bios thing first. The fans didn't spin up or anything. I reseated some stuff and disconnected data drive and optical drives so it would just be the mobo and system disk. Tried again and a bunch of caps popped and some sparks and smoke shot out the back of the PS. I guess I'll try a new one of those first.
 
Unfortunately the PS didn't solve the issue. The first time I tried booting with the new one I made it to the bios, where the computer froze and never managed to boot again. So is it safe to assume that the PS fried the mobo?


..Which would lead to another question. What would be the best ultra cheap mobo/cpu combo? I already have an i7 rig and I literally just use "the fire starter" as an internet box.
 
If its just a box for the net, go with the cheapest one on Newegg that supports your processor. I'm sure they have some for 50 bones
 
have you tried resetting the bios? (swap your jumper, boot, turn off, re-swap and boot)

maybe it got infected - its rare but it can happen with some mean ass virus's

edit: on that note p4's are notorious for overheating. i've got a p4 at home here and its a cunt. i had to hit in a 120mm fan just to keep it below 90deg operating temperature and its not overclocked because of my intel d915pbl blocks it from being so. it could very well be your chip has fried and has fucked your motherboard. pop out the board and scan real close for fry marks. i once didn't pop in a stick of ram correctly and i fried my motherboard. it was the smallest little fry on a piece of the board. im talking like the size of a pencil nib but it stopped the entire machine from booting. it didn't even give me any beeps or anything. only way i found out was to scan through the board.

if it is your motherboard grab the same one as me if your not after over clocking. its perfect and the cheapest one is $33.99 (ex shipping) on amazon.com and has done me perfect since i friend my last one about 8 or 9 years back
 
Yeah I did try resetting the bios with the jumper both before and after the final bios failure. I've gotten some good year out of the box. AFAIK both temperatures and voltages were pretty solid until a couple of days ago. I had the ASUS monitoring software running in the background forever and it theoretically should have warned me.
 
Oh something similar happened to me. :)

Does it say "insert system disk and blabla" or "err1err3". Do you use Vista? :) If yes, my problem was this :

I talked to some Microsoft dude on an IRC channel I go sometimes and he told me briefly that Vista removed some important files and lalala, so basically Vista committed suicide. He told me to either install XP but since my computer came with Vista pre-installed I would need to go do some SATA stuff thats sounds complicated. Or to pay around 300$ and get Windows 7, because Windows Vista committed suicide... SO... I tried Ubuntu to confirm if it was hardware or software problems. And I had lost hope of losing all my files, and I did lose all.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

So my advice is before throwing it away or whatever, at least try ubuntu. :p

However, smoke sounds bad. :) But while I was trying to resuscitate my computer, I lost "contact" with the motherboard. But it was cuz I plugged something in the D instead of the C cable.

And once in ubuntu I played with the HD's partitions. And now my computer works fine but it's on ubuntu, so music production on that is kinda sucky. Unless there are things I do not know.
 
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