Topic: PC not booting

[daveeb]

G'day all

As title says i turned pc on tonight and it booted fine but then the cursor disappeared and the pc froze. I did a hard reboot and the fans run but there is no signal to the monitor.  I did have to change the time yesterday so i thought maybe it may be a dicky mobo battery.  Would this prevent booting and any recommendations for removing the battery or any other ideas.  Its a medion 8386 running xp sp2.  its been as good as gold for months now so i wasn't expecting trouble from it   

[sam]

does it make any of the normal booting noises? could be just the monitor (things tend to happen all at once to confuse! :-) ) or the graphics card... do you have another machine that you could test the screen with, at least then you could discount this

[daveeb]

Sam it doesnt make a lot of noise normally so its difficult to tell if it is booting up properly, all i get is a "going to sleep" message from the monitor when i boot the pc.  I do have a second pc so i'll try the monitor on that but at the moment i suspect the mobo battery.  Could that cause a complete failure to boot ??

[daveeb]

Just checked the monitor and its fine, i'll have a hunt around for a cr2032 battery 

[sam]

could be the battery but I wouldnt rush into it, I'd test all the cables and maybe swap the graphics card with something else if you have one before doing that, you never know it could just need pushing in a bit, but since you are think battery I guess you have tried that... well the dodgy connection part anyway.

Something to try, open the case and listen for the harddisks booting... you should be able to hear that

[Sandra]

If you go into the bios and set it to failsafe default or load optimised defaults then it should boot up even if the battery is knackered.

You would probably have to do this each time you start up as the battery wont hold the data in the CMOS for the next startup.

If that doesnt work then its probably not the battery 

[daveeb]

I cant get into the bios Sandra, after about a second or two from booting the monitor simply goes into standby "monitor going to sleep"...if it's unplugged then it says "attach cable".

Is there a downside to me removing the cmos battery, i still reckon it could be the problem but i'm reluctant to try it if it could make things worse, tho' its hard to imagine anything much worse 

[Sandra]

No problems at all Dave, just means that you will have to load bios defaults again, which is what I would do if I could get into the bios at this time anyway 

[daveeb]

Ah well the battery idea didnt work, nor removing all usb devices, nor reseating ram.  I can't fathom how to get the graphics card out but it looks to be fully in.  Think it'll have to be yet another call to my chums at medion   

[Sandra]

Sounds like the motherboard or psu has gone then Dave 

[daveeb]

Sandra I hope its the mobo as they're coming next week to replace it (again) along with the graphics card.  If the power supply was kaput surely the fans wouldn't spin up (or can you get a semi fail so it just has enough juice for the fans) 

[Sandra]

Not really certain but there are 5 volt and 12 volt supplies that presumably are tapped off from different windings.

[andyhx]

Hi Guys,
SOn's gaming m/c has similar problem today. Won't even do the memory check - gets to 1 (instead of 1024) and stops, then monitor goes to stand by. Tokk the 3 DIMMs out and tried one at a time in diff slots but no difference. Disconnected all drives and no difference; he has had a couple of mid-game shutdowns (much to his annoyance !) recently so what dya reckon. Power supple or mobo?? Got a couple of hrs tomo to try and fix it if anyone has any suggestions.

Cheers
Andy

[Sandra]

First of all use the clear CMOS jumper to reset the bios to its defaults and see if that helps.

[daveeb]

Well the engineer came and replaced the mobo and gfx card.  Still nada so he replaced the (2 month old) ram and bingo, one of the sticks had been faulty. Unfortunately for me he then put the old gfx card back in as he didnt want to wait for the new card drivers to download. Overall i was quite pleased tho' as he knew his stuff.  I suppose i should have spotted the fault myself by trying one stick at a time but i overlooked it     If only the mobo would post on bootup i'd have diagnosed the fault, but the engineer claimed that 8386 pc's mobo (MSI 7091) dont have the onboard speaker connected    At least i can put off my search for a new pc temporarily