Pc won't post :( need help

[Jawed]

Take the mobo out of the case and set it up for testing. Give it a good shake in case something's fallen where it shouldn't and clear out dust.

I once "killed" my mobo with a dangling firewire connector that got where it shouldn't, shorting the mobo. Once I found the culprit everything was fine.

Jawed

 

[Bludd]

If you know someone with the same motherboard, you could borrow their BIOS chip and do a hot swap flash.

Boot via the borrowed BIOS chip, replace it with the presumably faulty one you have while the computer is on and flash it.

 

[PARANOiA]

Tried the full CMOS reset method outlined above and no dice :/ Will go mobo shopping over the weekend I guess :] Cheers all.

 

[hoom]

My flatmate had much the same issue recently, about 24hrs after I'd written it off as a bung mobo after trying replacing pretty much everything else, it wound up being a dead HDD.

I'd presumed he'd tried isolating to each of his two HDDs but had apparently merely unplugged one & it turned out to be that he'd unplugged the boot drive.
With the dead non-boot drive unplugged it posted as normal

 

[Davros]

I had a similar problem once turned out a price of solder on the underside of the board was touching the case

 

[PARANOiA]

So I bought a new motherboard and it won't post either :/ No beeps this time either. All I've had connected so far is RAM, video card and CPU (so it's definitely not a HDD issue). It's odd because not all of the items on the board appear to be being powered - the CPU fan didn't spin up when plugged into the CPU fan socket, but did when plugged into the system fan socket. It's a Gigabyte E45PT-UD3R.

I'm thinking it may be a dead CPU... or it may be a slowly dying PSU? The problem now is I have dropped ~$200 on a motherboard I probably didn't need, and if buying a new CPU doesn't help I'll be buying one of everything new until I find it - hoping of course that whatever is causing a failure isn't taking new parts along with it.

I'm somewhat tempted to go out and buy a new i7, another board and a new cooler.

I'm pretty frustrated at component death at the moment.. thinking it'll be cheaper in the long run to buy a low-powered shell system, chuck in my hard drives, buy a decent laptop and treat my desktop PC as a pure server.

 

[hoom]

Did you try isolating to one HDD yet? (& swapping HDD)

 

[almighty]

My bet is your PSU, get a multimeter and test a couple of pins.

My bet is that the 4/8 pin CPU feed is dead or some parts of the 24pin are.

Either that or its a grounding problem.

Also RAM, did you say you have tried the ram in another machine?

 

[PARANOiA]

Did you try isolating to one HDD yet? (& swapping HDD)

No HDD's have been connected.

My bet is your PSU, get a multimeter and test a couple of pins.

My bet is that the 4/8 pin CPU feed is dead or some parts of the 24pin are.

Either that or its a grounding problem.

Also RAM, did you say you have tried the ram in another machine?

I have tried swapping the RAM sticks and booting with no RAM - but no go there. I have tried an older PSU - but it only has a 20-pin connector and no 8-pin - but again had the same issue.

 

[Bludd]

Try starting the system with no CPU and see if it beeps.

 

[PARANOiA]

Tried that and no dice :/

Anyway - now have an i7 920 and everything's working again. Guess it was spontaneous CPU death.

The one oddity I have now - a little amusing actually - Windows 7 booted with a new CPU and new board (and new chipset) without issue. However it's reporting 8 distinct cores and reports performance on each of them. Anyone ever heard of this? Nothing I'm terribly concerned about but I'm a little curious.

 

[hoom]

Core i7 is 4 cores + HT = Windows sees it as 8.

No HDD's have been connected.

My flatmates PC failed to post & failed to beep or flash any LEDs with no HDD, failed with one drive, failed with both drives, failed with different HDD cables but worked when he went back to one HDD but using the other one than he'd tried to use before.