[tankertons20]

ok someone gave me a pc this week. and i'm having problems. i cannot seem to get the hard drive or cd rom to boot. when i put it to the power source plugs to these devices. they start to fire up. the hard drive starts spinning and the cd rom light comes on. when we plug the ide into these devices they will not fire up. please has anyone heard of this before and could this be my problem? thanks for any help or suggestions.

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Could be that you don't get 5 volt from your power supply unit. You do get 12 volt which run motors but not the lower voltage used by the electronics. Could also be that you have a problem with theb motherboard (corrupted BIOS, faulty IDE bus, faulty chipset etc).

Do you get any error message during startup? It is important to understand at what point exactly the computer fails.

[The Skeptic]

Could be that you don't get 5 volt from your power supply unit. You do get 12 volt which run motors but not the lower voltage used by the electronics. Could also be that you have a problem with theb motherboard (corrupted BIOS, faulty IDE bus, faulty chipset etc).

Do you get any error message during startup? It is important to understand at what point exactly the computer fails.

[tankertons20]

well we had it working a few days ago. we removed the hard drive to check another pc, it worked. so we put it back in the original tower and the power source is is working. when we connect the ide cables we get no power to either the hard drive or cd rom.

[xxx1]

try another ide cable if its the fine wire cable connector they can sometimes break.

cheers...xxx1

[tankertons20]

well if that wire is broken will it cause no spinning in the hard drive, or no cd rom activity.

[xxx1]

just an idea to narrow down the possible causes that your having otherwise - if you are still having issues and suspect that it is malware related I would start with our malware forum and see if they can make sure you don't have any malware installed.

http://www.geekstogo..._Log-t2852.html

cheers...xxx1

[tankertons20]

well i will have to run out later to get new ide's , but thank you both for all your time.i appreciate all the insight you provide.

[Tyger]

You may not need new cables, something which doesn't seem to have occured to anyone is "what are your jumper settings?". On older machines the jumpers may need to be set to master and slave, on newer ones they may need to be cable select. BTW, don't put the CD on the same cable as the HDD, it will greatly slow down operation.