PC won't start.. mobo LED is on, no error beeps

**RowaN** · 11th September 2010

PC died - please help me diagnose..

About 6 months ago the heatsink fell off a chip on my mobo. Not the main CPU but the intel 82848 MCH chip (northbridge?)... anyway, I did nothing about it.. and I'm guessing this has finally culminated in mobo death? (mobo is ASUS P4P800S-X)

When I turn it on nothing at all appears on the screen anymore. The mobo has an LED which is on, not blinking, and no beeping. The HDD and fans seem to have power, but no HDD activity. I'm sure there used to be an LED on the gfx card too (Asus AH3650 silent), I don't have another to test with unfortunately.

Any ideas guys? Thanks in advance.

**Realist** · 11th September 2010

Remove everything from the mobo and just leave connected one drive (c), one stick of ram and start from there, the basics.

If it does not power up try a bios reset and of that does not work remove all ram and try again, the mobo should now beep showing its detected no ram.

If after that still nothing then suspect mobo or processor but do eliminate them you need another mobo.

Regards

**RowaN** · 11th September 2010

Without RAM it does beep, so it must be alive in some sense. Still nothing on the screen, I need to find an AGP gfx card to see if its that. Its a relitively new and modern card so I'd be upset if that is what has died.

**Realist** · 12th September 2010

If the mobo does not have its own inbuilt grafix card then yes try another just in case.

**sonysteve** · 12th September 2010

Have u tried Re-seat ur processor. If this has come away slightly, there is no warning signs just a black screen.

**Over Carl** · 12th September 2010

Whenever this happens to my work pc's I just reseat everything which does the trick most of the time. If not, then as mentioned remove everything but the basics and keep adding/substituting until you find the problem.

**ruggie_uk** · 12th September 2010

I would try another PSU.
Causes this problem and see it no end of times at my shop.
Just because it is powering up doesn't mean it's working properly.

**mysterym** · 12th September 2010

Originally Posted by ruggie_uk

I would try another PSU.
Causes this problem and see it no end of times at my shop.
Just because it is powering up doesn't mean it's working properly.

I'd agree with that, psu's problems can be a pain in the butt. Remember a cd rom drive not working in a brand new pc years ago, changed the drive, no difference, then the motherboard. turns out the psu was knackered.

**gurry** · 12th September 2010

Originally Posted by RowaN

Without RAM it does beep, so it must be alive in some sense. Still nothing on the screen, I need to find an AGP gfx card to see if its that. Its a relitively new and modern card so I'd be upset if that is what has died.

Hang on. You said it beeps with no RAM installed. How many times and what else was connected.

Find your mother board manual and see what the message means.

**DejaVu** · 13th September 2010

Ruggie_UK's nailed it, definately the power supply.

Mate of mine has the exact same problem. Bought his PC round here, tried my PSU. Game on.
Buy, borrow or steal a new PSU before trying anything else.

Pretty much guarantee it's that.

**RowaN** · 15th September 2010

Thanks guys I will try a new PSU when I can. Next problem: I am trying to get data off the hard drive but not having luck. Its a 2.5" IDE hard drive. Using a USB-2-IDE cable, windows 7 sees the drive but says it needs formatting(!). The drive is TOSHIBA MK1031GAS but its showing as TORHHB@ LK0021FAR .. not sure if that means that its all corrupt even including the hard drive header, or if maybe its just incompatible with the converter cable (it is NTFS and partitioned). I'm running a util called PhotoRec now to see if I can recover any files at a low level, but its all junk so far (158 hours remaining... hmm)

All the files it has "recovered" so far seem to be garbled e.g. this HTML file:
<htll<<he`d<<leta http-dqtit
vs
<html><head><meta http-equiv

Surely the PSU and hard drive wouldn't die at the same time? Grrr

UPDATE: I tried another 2.5" HDD with the USB2IDE adaptor and that didn't work either!! This HDD deffo works as I just took it out of a working PC. Back to eBay for a refund this adaptor is going...