Antique PC

Ive just visited a member of staff's house to fix a PC, its an old P3 with windows 98, it wont boot up. He moved it from one room to another and now wont boot up.

Screen turns off when connected to PC working on another PC, so monitor o.k!

CD-ROM will not eject when IDE cable is connected to mother board but when IDE disconnected will light up and eject as normal.

Have disconected everthing apart from hard drive inside, and still no boot so not anything to do with floppy or CD-ROM.

Leaves motherboard and Hard drive. Didnt have any spares at the time,

but hard drive and power light stay on together (static) so i suspect it maybe the hard drive which is the problem rather than the motherboard, as it still supplys power everywhere else. Any ideas things to try thursday evening lol?

Cheers!

Try disconnecting the harddrive just to see if the monitor problem is related to the drive failure.
Do you get POST splash screen.
Can you get into the BIOS.
If you reconnect the CD-ROM can you boot into a live LinuxCD?

Better hope its a motherboard problem because the question will be "..backups?"

no bios screen, no post splash screen, didnt try to boot off CD didnt have everything with me at the time, im thinking fingers crossed its hard drive becasue there is a backup!!

Any POST beeps? Without doign the sucking eggs bit ... have you checked a) the power from the PSU to the mobo? b) the PSU is working right? and c) that the battery is on the board ok?

lol

yeh PSU fine, checked and wokring fine, no beeps though!

reseated battery, could be battery?:

solid hard disk activity light tends to suggest hard disk problem - this sympton also occurs when the IDE cable is upside down. Neither of these things will tend to stop the POST screen appearing.

Try resetting the CMOS just on the off chance otherwise a trip to the shops may be in order for a new mobo.

Using a multimeter, test to see if you get a signal out of pin 1 of the IDE ports ... or if you get anything from the speaker connection. I once had a sleaker die in a case and couldn't work out what the other post errors where.

When you say that the PSU is ok have you used a multimeter to check or tried it on a differend mobo?

It seriously sounds like the mobo to me though ...

yeh multimeter tested, to be honest im suprised no ones said buy a new computer and pop the hard drive in it!

plug the keyboard and mouse in the right way round? I do remember 440BX boards wouldn't boot if the 2 ps/2 ports were plugged in the wrong way :P

Have you checked the jumper settings on the IDE Devices
Are the CDROM & HDD running on the same IDE Cable, have sometimes encountered drives not working if set to Cable Select, and the IDE connectors are not connected properly.

Try it without the HDD connected but the monitor, keyboard and mouse. If still no go, then new mobo time so its either ebay or get em a cheap IBM from Dabs for a few hundred quid and they will be happy as larry for 5 years.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by danIT

yeh multimeter tested, to be honest im suprised no ones said buy a new computer and pop the hard drive in it!

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Yeah get an apple mac, and an external hard drive caddy, slap the hard drive inside the hard drive caddy ( obviously ) Then connect and enjoy :)

If they dont wanna spend much cash then a mac mini would be a good starting point considering they already have a screen and a mouse and keyboard :)