Do not pass POST, do not collect $200

Gavin_86

New member
I had just recently installed a second hard drive (200 GB Western Digital) on my computer and had it up and running when I decided to install the newest version of Ubuntu. I had just set up the partions when I decided to let it install and went for a quick shave. When I got back it was on the Time configuation screen, and after attempting to select an option I noticed it was actually frozen (which has happened before with Ubuntu many times). So I restarted my computer, thinking, "no big deal." Apparently not so much..

After restarting nothing would boot. And by, "nothing", I mean literally nothing. Nothing was being sent to the monitor, it was giving me the, "no data", screen basically or was on and just blank. No happy-fun-time startup beeping noises, it didn't seem to be accessing the hard drives either. The CPU fan and other components were all getting power, it just wouldn't do anything. Although there was no monitor output, I'm pretty positive it wasn't even loading the BIOS. It wasn't making any of the usual startup noises and such...

I'm not really a hardware guy at all, so I don't really know what I'm doing. But anyone have any useful suggestions, things to check out, before I chuck the computer out the window? Is it worth it to get it analyzed by a professoinal (appx $$$ ?) and why do I get the feeling I'm not going to like many of these answers.. I really need my computer pretty much immediatly for work, and I'm hoping the hard drives are okay considering I have the last month's worth of work on there, which I was about to upload right before updating linux but thought better to save it for when I went to sleep. yay for me.<img src=smilies/retard.gif>

any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
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> any help would be greatly appreciated.

Well, the first rule of troubleshooting is remove anything you've added right before the problem.

I.E. - that hard drive. Remove it, and try booting (if you said you already did this and I didn't read it I appologize for my illiteracy).

If that doesn't work - reseat a component at a time - starting with the CPU. If you say the fans are getting power (and they are actually spinning up) you might have to just reseat your CPU - unless it crapped out. That's always a possibility, I'm not trying to scare you or anything. Anyway if that doesn't fix your problem, you could try reseating the RAM - though I doubt that would cause a complete *nothing* to happen. If anything your machine would give you some beep codes signifying your RAM was outta whack.

Also - how old is your computer, specifically your power supply - and how many items do you have in your machine (how many CD/DVD drives, floppies, Zip drives, HDDs, etc)? Basically that last HDD you installed could be pulling more power than the PS can supply to it. If you have a set up with 1 DVD drive, no floppy/ZIP, and just one other HDD then this is probably not the problem - but you *could* have a bad PS.

I'm at work right now so I cant think of anything else but if I do I'll post it here.
 
There should be a jumper near the battery, try switching the pins its connecting to reset the bios, wait a minute then change them back.
 
considering you get no beeps at all, this points to either bad CPU, bad BIOS, bad motherboard or bad power supply.

on most motherboards, the computer will not turn off while holding the power buttong for 5 seconds if the CPU is bad. however, this is not always the case.

you should jumper pin 14 of the ATX connector with GND and use a voltmeter to check the voltages coming out of the power supply.

if the Bios is bad... if the (E)EPROM or Flash ROM is not soldered to the board you can flash it with a programmer (i believe you have one).

if none of those show signs of badness.... try using the CPU and memory in another motherboard... cause odds are your mobo is dead if you get to this point
 
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