[rythymace]

My husband ran a scan disk yesterday followed by a defrag. He left the defrag running while he left to pick me up from work. When we returned everything, ie. printer, speakers, microphone and monitor were still powered on, but the cpu was not and will not. I unplugged it and plugged in again and got an instant sound of booting from the speaker, but within milliseconds was off again. I tried to plug into a different outlet etc. What went wrong? Is is the hard drive or is there another option. We have all of our family photos on this computer. Help
Patti

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if you're using XP, you can boot from the cd. There will be a Repair option. This will tell you if something fried in the computer, or it's just some problem with XP

if it's not XP (or even if it is), you can use a win98 boot up floppy disk, and see if the computer can actually boot up at all. If not, there is a hardware problem. If it boots from the floppy, you still might not be able to access the hard drive if it's formatted as NTFS... the dos bootup disk will say terrible things, like you may have a virus, it can't find a hard drive, etc... because dos can't read the NT file structure.

So, the floopy boot will at least tell you if the motherboard and memory are ok
the XP cd bootup and repair will see if the harddrive is still good

[Tim Wellman]

if you're using XP, you can boot from the cd. There will be a Repair option. This will tell you if something fried in the computer, or it's just some problem with XP

if it's not XP (or even if it is), you can use a win98 boot up floppy disk, and see if the computer can actually boot up at all. If not, there is a hardware problem. If it boots from the floppy, you still might not be able to access the hard drive if it's formatted as NTFS... the dos bootup disk will say terrible things, like you may have a virus, it can't find a hard drive, etc... because dos can't read the NT file structure.

So, the floopy boot will at least tell you if the motherboard and memory are ok
the XP cd bootup and repair will see if the harddrive is still good

[macten]

Patti....does the power supply fan stay on? Or does it spin for a couple of seconds and die?

[rythymace]

TIM & MACTEN,
I DON'T THINK YOU UNDERSTAND THAT THERE IS NO POWER TO THE CPU. EVERYTHING IS PLUGGED IN AND WE EVEN BOUGHT A NEW POWER SUPPLY FOR IT AND IT STILL WON'T TURN ON! I AM THINKING THAT IF IT WERE THE HARD DRIVE, IT WOULD STILL POWER ON, JUST NOT USEFUL, WHAT ELSE COULD HAVE HAPPENED?

[DHooper]

If you are pretty confiedent with computers, then unplug and remove everything from the motherboard:

CPU
RAM
Any Addon cards (Sound, Network)
Powercables
IDE

!!!(Make note on where everything goes since you need to put them back just the way they are now)!!!

Now reset evreything but the Addon cards, if the computer will boot turn off and add one card at a time in the same place that there were at. If the computer cant then there must have been a spike or a brownout and the motherboard, or CPU is bad. To get the pic back just remove the harddrive and place it in another system with a CD/DVD burner in it and back them up along with any other data. Hope that this helps.

Edited by DHooper, 20 February 2005 - 02:48 AM.

[rythymace]

DHooper,

Thanks, I'll let ya know tomorrow what happened.

Patti

[Tim Wellman]

Oh, ok, I thought you said you could hear it start to boot, then it shut off. There's a big difference... if you get nothing at all, then you could look at a fuse, maybe, but if you replaced the actual power supply in the case, and that didn't help, it does sound like a fried motherboard unfortunately... a bad cpu or memory shouldn't make the system not come on at all, it'd just hang at the boot, as would a bad harddrive or connection... but, as macten said, you would still hear the fan in the power supply working, even if the motherboard was fried, so, there's an puzzle

As dhooper said, you can put the harddrive in another xp computer as the secondary drive, and copy the photos over to the main drive.... but, only if the problem with the computer happened during a non-critical phase of the defrag... if everything stopped right in the middle of the defrag, you may also have a non-readable harddrive now, as well

The only thing I can think of is the defrag put the mb under too much stress... perhaps the cpu fan stopped, or some other series of events that led to a great deal of heat which then fried the mb...

Let us know what you figure out

[macten]

On a dead pc, the first thing any technician would look at is the fan on the powersupply......sheesh............................................................

[DHooper]

I was once working on a computer that wont turn on, not even the fan of the powersupply was working. I ripped the whole computer apart and pieced it back together. I turn the computer on with no addon cards, and the darn thing booted up. So I power down and installed the sound, NIC, USB, cards in one by one, and everytime the computer booted. When I went to install the video card, nothing, the computer dont get any power. I tired install the video card in all the other slots(PCI) and it still wouldnt boot. But the odd thing was that all the other cards worked in every slot. It seemed that the motherboard didnt like any type of video card, other then the onboard video(and yes the onboard video was disable when I tried install the PCI video card), the darn thing didnt even like a 16MB VooDoo card!! Now dont take this the wrong way macten, but the first thing that a technician check would be all the physical connections.

[rythymace]

I just wanted to say THANKS to all of you for your help. Unfortunately, I think you guys are right, we fried the mother! This morning we were able to get it running, but the cpu fan stopped after a few minutes and it started smelling burnt. That's where I am, don't know if anything was lost on hard drive yet.

Patti

[Major Payne]

We have all of our family photos on this computer.  HelpPatti  

Sorry to hear that it may be fried. Possibly not though, as my second pc had it's cpu fan start to run ragged then stop. Could boot up, but pc would freeze within minutes. Took covers off, booted pc and that's where I found the problem with the fan. Thought I fried the processor as this thing ran for a while like that. A new fan cured the problem and pc has been working since. Possibly with the motherboard you have, there's a fail safe which detects the fan not running and shuts pc down to the point it will not boot. A new PS wouldn't help here. Doesn't preclude the fact that more than the fan has been fried. Just wanted to let you know it's possible.

Recommend a UPS if you leave PC on. Not just for the ability to shut down in an power outage, but as a way to provide a clean a/c supply.

If you absolutely need to recover your drive, I know of a company that will do it at a rate that is far below most others. No recovery, no charge. They did a drive for one of the local newspaper guys. Let me know and I will PM the URL to you. If you can get another pc (out of warranty), you might try installing drive as a slave and see if your data is recoverable.

Ron

[macten]

Some good advice dhooper. But I would still look at the fan on the power supply first. It only takes about 3 seconds.....