My other unit will not boot up???

[HeyMarine]

Hello,
I'm new to this Forum and was turned on to PC Mech. by a friend in Ireland.

I have a home built P3 550 MHz. Every thing has been working fine until I went to power it up and it will not even start the self check or look for the A drive. I also see nothing on the monitor. I do see the cooling fan on the CPU running and feel the powerpack fan running...I'm at a loss and need some help...

[ktkendall]

HeyMarine;
You are looking at either the RAM , the video card, or the mainboard, has problems. When you say everything has been working fine untill I went to power it up, do you mean this PC has worked for a poriod of time and suddenly one day you went to power it up and then the problem occured??
You should be getting a series of beep codes that help pinpoint you to the faulty component. If you have another PC to test some of these components with, could help you locate the faulty one. The Power Supply could even still be at fault even though the fan is running. Could also be the Mainboard went bad and caould take the power supply with it or visa-versa!
Check the mem and vid card to see if they're just loose in their slots!

[HeyMarine]

I did swap out the power supply and it made no difference. Yes it has been working fine untill I went to power it up. Where should I look or listen for the beep codes? Is it the led light on the motherboard?

[ktkendall]

The beep codes come from the PC speaker, so obviously that has to be connected. The motherboard manual should give you the meaning of the codes.

[GaryRouth]

Hi all

If you have a red light on the motherboard, it sounds like you have a motherboard with diagnostic LEDs: just as with beep codes, the motherboard's manual will list what error matches the LED display. By the way, are you hearing beep codes?

If you have the make/model of the motherboard handy, post it here: it might help us. If you don't have a manual around, you can usually find one at the manufacturer's website.

Were you overclocking the 350?
. . . Gary

[HeyMarine]

Thanks you guys, its not finding anything so I'm not getting to the point where it gives the beep codes..I've disconnected all the drives and video card and the modem and sound card, also removed one stick of mem all one at a timewith no luck. the motherboard is AsusP3C2000.

[GaryRouth]

Hi again

Here's a link to a manual for your Asus board over at motherboards.org. It's a 5mb download. Just in case you don't have a copy of your original around. That motherboard has got a lot of jumpers on it, by golly. And it is possible to overclock with it, though with the 820 chipset I can't see that working very well. If you were overclocking previously, try manually setting the jumpers back to default for the 350.

http://www.motherboards.org/manuals/...2000/3149.html

And here's a link to a troubleshooting procedure for new builds, but you can use it to copy the "stripped down" approach:

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.p...threadid=12753

Sounds like you've already done some of these steps already. Truly stripped down is just the motherboard(w.hs/fan/cpu), video, memory, and monitor. When your computer was working in the past, you should have heard one short beep each time that you powered it on. Did you always hear that beep until this last trouble? Or have you never heard any beeps? (that usually means that you don't have the case speaker hooked up). If it's not hooked up, try plugging it in (it's in the manual as to the location for the connector on the motherboard).

I'm still curious about the red light you spoke of. I looked over a picture of that board from an old review at xbit labs, and I couldn't see anything at first glance that looked like an LED (and since I'm not on DSL at the moment the 5mb download is a little prohibitive for my taking a quick look at your manual) . . . that red light sounds like the best clue so far: comb over the manual until you find a reference for it. It will probably lead us to what part is failing.

Good luck
. . . Gary