PC not POSTing

[Choupolo]

Ok, now it's my turn to start having PC problems! :bucky!:

I moved my PC between houses recently, and it's been up and running fine for the last few days or so, and before that for several years. Suddenly I came back to my PC today (which I left running but doing nothing) and find a blank screen and my PC unresponsive. The reset button on the front of the machine wouldn't work, and I had to hold the on/off button to cut the power manually.

Now my PC won't even POST. I can turn it on, and it stays on. The mobo light and all the fans work, and the HDD will start spinning, but it won't do anything more. Nothing on the monitor at all (apart from a standby signal). It's as if the power is running through the mobo, but it's just not booting anything at all.

Tried unplugging everything systematically - CPU, RAM, harddrive, sound card, gfx card, optical drives - until only the mobo (w/w/o gfx card) was plugged in. No change, no beeps, same situation.


So my questions are:

- I'm assuming only a mobo failure can cause my PC not to POST at all no matter what, right? If it was anything else like RAM or cpu etc, taking out the RAM or cpu would at least result in a beep or a bios error screen wouldn't it?? :Oo:

- A PSU problem would probably cause the PC to turn itself off rather than keep running..?

-Can a mobo just die spontaneously without warning like this? Nothing was running, or recently OCed. Maybe there was a power surge? But there weren't any storms and nothing else is damaged in the house. Maybe it was knocked when moving, but it's been fine all this time...

.....
Specs:
Asus P4P800 Deluxe
Intel P4 Northwood 2.8G
1G Kingston HyperX RAM
Maxtor 120G HDD
Zalman 400W PSU
6800GT
Audigy 2 ZS
.....

Well I'm leaving the mobo battery out for a while to see what reseting the CMOS will do. And I might be taking a trip into town to see if anyone has an old P4P800 Deluxe for sale.

Any help in the mean time would of course be payed for in [strike]money[/strike] grateful sentiment. And I'll keep you posted...

[BLACK KNIGHT]

Something to try would be to reset the CMOS (look in the mobo manual). I have also seen dusty ram cause this problem. Take out the ram and make sure its not dusty. I saw you thought of this stuff but other than the MOBO the only other thing that might cause this problem would be video card. The video card is the one of the first things to post. if you have an old card (preferable with a different socket type pci, agp,... try that). I hope everything works out fine for you.

BK

[64705]

I had a problem like this once. My PC would boot up, but the screen was totally blank. I found out that my PC case was touching the motherboard and shorting it out because I didn't put some of those risers on, little round paper things that you put on underneath the screws on your motherboard.

I recommend taking your motherboard out of your case, putting it on an antistatic bag and see if it boots like that.

It worked for me. GL :thumbup:

[GT@Ultra]

But it worked for years?

[64705]

Originally posted by GT@Ultra@Jun 22 2006, 01:02 PM
But it worked for years?

Yeah it is possible the motherboard is in contact with something metal and is shorting... so to you too, punk.

[Choupolo]

Woot, I am noow inside! *puppet master voice* Thanks for the replies! In the end it was a busted motherboard after all. I dunno if it had shorted all of a sudden, I did have it on risers, but there was a loose screw floating about in there somewhere all this time. Perhaps I was just really unlucky (and on Prey day too, bastages)! Oh and reseting the CMOS didn't end up solving the problem, but apparently it could've also been the bios locking me out.

Took it to my local PC shop today, and they tried to stick in a different CPU, cos apparently the machine wont post without a CPU either. But that didn't have any effect, so I went ahead and bought an old P4S800 mobo since ASUS don't make my mobo anymore. It's more or less the same as my P4P800, just with an SiS chipset instead of an Intel one, and a slightly reduced feature set (no Dual Channel for RAM, no gigabit LAN, no Firewire, only 3 PCI slots, and only room to plug in one of my chassis fans).

Turned it on, it POSTed (woo!), and then while it was loading Windows it flashed up a blue screen for a split second and reset itself! NooO!

After messing about with some bios doodahs, it turned out to be some RAID setting for my SATA HDD that was causing it. I changed it to run in the slower IDE mode instead of SATA mode and it booted up flawlessly, re-detecting all my devices. Yay!

...

Ok so now everything is perfect (minus having to activate Windows again!), apart from that I can't use my HDD in SATA mode, cos of this blue screen. It resets so quickly I can't read what it says! It's something to do with Windows, so is this a driver problem? Nothing seems to be missing in the device manager.

I guess I'll try fiddling with the SATA drivers on the mobo disc, but my old mobo didn't need any SATA drivers, so I'm a bit confused. The story unfolds...

[Gazz]

Originally posted by Choupolo@Jun 22 2006, 02:40 PM
Turned it on, it POSTed (woo!), and then while it was loading Windows it flashed up a blue screen for a split second and reset itself! NooO!

Press start>configurationscreen>system>advanced>boot and recovery settings and uncheck reboot system automaticly there. Some of the words must be different in the english version of XP but I simply don't have that version. Anyway, it's the dutch motogp in my hometown (Assen, Netherlands) now and Gazz is going to go ride on his motorcycle and chase women :thumbup:

[Choupolo]

Ah ok, thx gazz, good tip. I'll see what that blue screen says. Tbh, it's not that much slower than it was before once Windows has loaded. Perhaps it is running in SATA after all. I tried installing the RAID drivers but it didn't help.

It kind says this in the bios: SATA Controller mode: RAID mode, Native mode or SATA Controller Disabled.

And under Native mode it says: 'Only generic IDE drives can be used'. It still works through the SATA port under native mode, so this confuses me a little. Perhaps I've understood the meaning of IDE wrongly.

Also, I thought RAID was for multiple drives only...?? Which would explain why it wouldn't work! Or perhaps it only works with a fresh install of Windows. :bucky!:


Enjoy chasing women on your motorcycle, Gazz. Careful not to run any of them over in the process! :P


EDIT: Ack, got some nice blue screens all of a sudden! I think I blew one of my RAM sticks during this whole episode. Damn, that's £100 down the drain...