However, a few days ago I sat down to surf and the monitor screen was completely blank. Using the keyboard generated no response. I also noticed the light in my optical mouse was not lit. I tried ctrl-alt-del several times to no avail. Finally I
just powered it down (yes, it was still running). Over several days I tried restarting it and shutting it down, just to see if maybe it was a temporary glitch. No luck getting it to boot. In fact nothing ever appears on the monitor screen, and there are no boot or error beeps - none at all. It does start, but that's it. I have two fans in the computer and they all run fine (including the one on the cooling fins of the CPU).
I can feel the hard drive vibrating as the disks spin. The green power light on the front of the case is lit and the yellow light indicating the hard drive is working stays on constantly indicating drive activity. One unusual thing is that neither
of the two DVD drives indicates they have power. No lights on the drives and they don't open when I push the eject button. If I open them manually, they don't slide closed unless I push them in. I tried a different monitor and then added another video card just to be sure it wasn't the monitor or video card. I also made sure every card was seated properly (I also reseated the RAM and the CPU) and checked that every connection for electrical wires and data cables was properly plugged in. Since this problem first happened with the computer running just fine while sitting on a desk in my den, I really don't think anything worked its way loose.
I pulled the hard drive out and connected it to my laptop as an external USB device and was able to write and read to it as if nothing was wrong, so that's why I don't suspect a hard drive problem. I keep my virus protection current and while
connected to my laptop I scanned it again without identifying any problems. I probably should have done a scan disk on it, but I really think it's okay. With all hardware appearing functional, and since there are no error messages or beeps during boot up, I tend to believe it's the CPU or motherboard. Except for power to the hard drive I don't think the drive is being accessed at all by the pc. I even unplugged all of my peripherals (DVD-ROM, floppy drive, etc.) to reduce the power draw, but still there was nothing.
If the CPU or the motherboard has gone bad, I have no way of testing them. The CPU is Duron by AMD and it's a Socket A 462 type. Unfortunately I can't remember the CPU speed. I don't have access to any computers which use AMD CPUs to try testing another known good one.
I'm not sure about the maker of the motherboard. There is something that appears to be a model number (D33064 Rev. A and a UPC of 0000000096076, but an Internet search turns up nothing of value).
Has anyone ever dealt with a problem like this? How did you resolve it? Any suggestions? Any help?
Thanks!