Computer Problem

[CHEVY05CREW]

A friend of mines computer wouldn't boot up so he asked me to take a look at it. When you turn on the computer all the fans come on but nothing else happens. I checked the power supply voltage, processor, RAM, mainboard, hard drive and video card.....all work perfectly but the computer still doesn't boot. Only thing I hadn't checked was the old PCI 56K modem. I pulled the modem out and the computer boots and works perfectly. In the 12 years I've been working on computers, I never had a computer not boot because of a bad modem. Anyone else ever had this happen?

[rod_b]

I've had all kinds of problems with bad hardware and XP. It's so frustrating that I quit PC gaming and only play Xbox 360 or PS3. My current PC keeps complaining about System Interrupt Controller not being installed and it blue-screens constantly. :sigh:

[MuskyHunter]

I had that happen with a network card. We had a lightning strike near that came in through the phone/dsl line. The point of presence was fused and all our computers, lan switches, and phones were taken out. I wrote off the computer and later when salvaging it, I had the network card removed and it booted. I assume that the card presented some kind of short across the bus.

[i386]

Yup. I've seen it before. In that situation, always be prepared to strip the PC down to the lowest number of parts and then add them back one by one until you can produce the symptom.

Essential gear:

Power supply tester (or multimeter) or known good power supply
known good video card

It's also nice when the box has 2 sticks of ram so you can use one at a time to rule out a bad stick.


The weirdest thing i ever had happen with a machine that wouldn't boot was after swapped the power supply and started connecting things one at a time, the tape drive shot out blue flames.

[UDMTITAN]

I actually had the same problem, turns out it was the damn case itself causing things to short out. Changed the case and is running stable now, besides gave me a good excuse to upgrade to water cooling.

[stlblues]

Yep, seen it. I have one harddrive that crashes the system if hooked up to the MB on the IDE, changed it to another computer and the same thing, but if I put it in an external case and run it on USB, it fuctions perfectly, and has for quite a while.

[bgbdwlf2500]

ive got a computer that is "married" to the ram stick. it will not work with ANY other ram stick....

[rholland]

I work for a school district, and have 750 desk tops, aprox 200 lap tops, and a dozen servers to take care of. I have seen floppy drives and cd drives cause a system not to boot. The first thing to do is unhook all drives, remove all cards, excelp video and ram, then see if it will post. I keep spare RAM and a pci video card in my tool bag, to test with.

[master_1011]

Most motherboards these days have onboard video...so you should try removing any secondary video card.

[BayStateSuks]

Sometimes peripheral devices can create an IRQ or IO conflict with devices on the motherboard. You can try changing it in the BIOS or you can pull the device and leave it out (probably easier).