Failure to POST, Experts Needed

Hello,

Recently i offered to fix a PC for someone. The problem was when turning the machine on the fans would rev up but then the machine would do nothing. No activity on Monitor etc.

For some reason, when removing the Cmos battery, power + CPU (i must stress the cpu seemed to be needed to be removed) then put them all back in, the pc would come on, but then crash when loading windows. When i say crash, i dont just mean freeze up, the screen would actually lock up and would have strage colours on it. I came to the conclusion the motherboard was knackered. The board is a 661 FX snapper, micro ATX.

on ebay i purchased a second hand one, same chipset but a bit different. The part arrived, i installed it. First time power up nothing happened, so i took the cmos battery out, back in, then it was booting fine. It did however, fail to load windows, it just didnt even try, it would boot off cd though, so i decided i needed to reinstall windows XP. whilst all this was going on i must have powered the pc off and on numerous times, it came on everytime and just got stuck when it came to looking for boot devices. I decided to leave it for the night and reinstall XP the next morning.

The next day i turned the machine on, it was doing exactly the same thing as the first motherboard, it was just revving the fans up and sitting there. I tried taking cpu, cmos battery out etc, no joy.

I then proceeded to swap EVERYTHING on the board, RAM, PSU, CPU, i even put it in another case! both boards are now doing the same thing, just revving the fans up and sitting there.

Does anyone have any ideas? I have come to the conclusion that whatever blew the first board has now blew the second board. Im about to surrender!

Cheers,

Yes, it would be nice to have a spare (or cheap) hard drive to test with for a clean install.

Have you tested the power supply?..

Need more specs to give you a accurate way to fix.