Power on, DVD lights flash, Fan whirrs... then nothing. Dead PC?

[mikeyB]

Hi,
Last night I booted my PC and it froze just as the Vista Pro logon was starting to appear. In fact it was during the Vista logo singsong and it just went into a continuous high pitched kiss of death.

Have tried rebooting several times since and all it does is flash the lights of the two installed DVD drives and then the fans keeps on whirring, but no healthy clunky-ish sound of an HD or two being accessed.

I don't know where to start. Is the Motherboard/CPU dead?

I just have a black screen and do not get a chance to get into the bios.
I tried rebooting with XP/Vista CDs in but to no avail.

Anyone with a killer idea or have I already been given the coup de grace?:dead:

Cheers, MikeyB

 

[trackrat]

If you are familiar with the hardware inside your computer, disconnect all your hard and optical drives, then see if it will boot.
With just the bare essentials it should boot, then shut down and connect one of the hard drives and try again, do this for each drive till you find what is causing the fault.
If it does not boot into the BIOS, post back and it can be taken from there.
It is unlikely to be the motherboard or CPU.

 

[Sazar]

Was this a new build, any recent changes, anything that was different about this boot?

Info given == better help received

 

[Guybrush]

I have just the same problem. I will try when I get home to remove the drives and go from there.

My computer is about 18 months old and has no recent hardware aditions. It was working fine then when I turned on the computer 2 hrs later, nothing.

The fans on the graphics card and processor are also both running.

Any advice would be much appreciated



Vista 64bit
4gb ram
nvidia 8800ultra
quad core processor
Nvidia 650 motherboard

 

[Guybrush]

Have removed all the drives and replaced one by one, still no luck. I have removed RAM and replaced it with new RAM, still no luck.

There is no beep on startup, which I forgot to mention before.

Motherboard or processor me thinks. Anybody have any other ideas?

 

[Dark Atheist]

if its not even posting then yes mobo or cpu could be the issue, although if its getting power to the board im more inclined to lean towards bad cpu, make sure its seated properly, i had that once before

 

[Guybrush]

Finally got it sorted with "a little help from my friends" and the EVGA website, my motherboards manufacturer.

This link should help most people:-

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=169747&mpage=1&key:)