Heartland

Switched my PC on yesterday and there was an almighty crackle through the speakers and it went dead.
At first I thought the power supply had popped but the fan is going and the hardrive light is on.
I'm thinking this is not good - changing the PS I could have handled.
Anyone got any suggestions as to the problem?
I'm hoping the hard drive is intact as, predictably, there is some music and photos I haven't got rounde to backing up - doh!

Do you have any display, or anything else running?

Dark wrote:Do you have any display, or anything else running?

The monitor comes up with the "no signal" message.

All I can suggest is trying the obvious first. Check the monitor cable, use a different one, etc.
I seem to recall a while ago having a similar problem, a power surge took out much of my hard drive. A lot of it may be recoverable, though, so put your hard drive into another computer and see if you can get anything.
It may be that your motherboard has broken from the surge, and that's why the monitor doesn't appear to be responding.

Does it sound like it's trying to do something, or load normally?

Good luck....

Mine is pretty annoying as well. Runs for an hour or so and then shuts down......like the plug is pulled out.

Erudite wrote:Switched my PC on yesterday and there was an almighty crackle through the speakers and it went dead.
At first I thought the power supply had popped but the fan is going and the hardrive light is on.
I'm thinking this is not good - changing the PS I could have handled.
Anyone got any suggestions as to the problem?
I'm hoping the hard drive is intact as, predictably, there is some music and photos I haven't got rounde to backing up - doh!

Eek - why was your sound system powered up before your PC? - I always do it the other way around, if for no other reason than to save the speakers ...
Meanwhile, I assume that you have checked fuses, connections etc. ? Have you or your neighbours got any spare hardware that you can cross check with? - Just an idea, but a process of elimination is often useful ... Anyway, best of luck - I will return here later with interest ...

Dark wrote: Does it sound like it's trying to do something, or load normally?

Powered on but making no attempt to boot up.

Thinking it might have been a power surge, but can't see any obvious cause.

It does sound like your hard drive has died

Only a couple of weeks ago I was telling someone that I've never had a chronic PC failure.

Arse!

Best bet now might be taking it into work.

any "beep-beep-beep" by the build-in speaker when switching the computer on?

>>> http://www.pchell.com/hardware/beepcodes.shtml

DocSommer wrote:any "beep-beep-beep" by the build-in speaker when switching the computer on?

>>> http://www.pchell.com/hardware/beepcodes.shtml

Not a sausage!

Doesn't sound like the hard drive, you'd expect it to at least get as far as the POST screen and then kick and scream over not having an OS - maybe more of a motherboard related prob?

mh wrote:Doesn't sound like the hard drive, you'd expect it to at least get as far as the POST screen and then kick and scream over not having an OS - maybe more of a motherboard related prob?

I'd guess that, too

Maybe it's worth a try to reconnect every connection (plugs, cards...) inside the computer. The next step should be a test with another power supply.

open the case, press everything down into place and make sure there are no loose connection - check for singe marks while you're in there

start it up with a windows installation cd in to see if it can boot from that...

although the lack of video output to the monitor sounds bad. even if it cant find your harddrive you'd expect something on the monitor

i had the same problem, a graphic card was little disconnected but it was after the cleaning.

hum, could be hard drive, motherboard, connection, power supply.
What missing oh yeah processor , basically, you have to get new pc

might be, last one when i had a trouble with my PC i had to buy a new one, cause: turn in. turn on. graphic card burn out.

Bartek wrote:i had the same problem, a graphic card was little disconnected but it was after the cleaning.

I'd go for the graphic card too, had that with my ancient PC, which is now equipped with a way better graphic card then my rather new Mac due to that

Shoot the f*cker

The voice of Reason hath spoken!

IZ.

Progress of a sort - I have replaced the motherboard and the machine is now booting up. The trouble is that it's detecting everything as new hardware and failing to load the drivers.
Before I resort to the drastic measure of running the restore disc, is this likely to be a bios issue?

F*ck! It was going so well...

I'd say you'll likely get the same with the restore disk - there's obviously quite a bit of different hardware on the new mobo.

I know it's gonna be a pain in the face, but the best approach would be to let it do it's thing and try to manually hunt down the correct drivers.

Even installing the chipset driver on it's own will probably deal with 50-75% of your "Unknown Device"s. For the rest, if you're having trouble identifying what it is, a good trick is to look at Properties | Details in Device Manager, then slap all or part of the Device Instance Id into Google. Got me out of a few tight spots in the past.

The handbook of the mainboard can be helpfull as well for the drivers, and the manufacturers offer Downloads, as is known.