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2 year old PC Failed to boot

Forum Homebuilt Systems : General Homebuilt - 2 year old PC Failed to boot

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chengwingsam   10-19-2009 at 04:26:24 AM

Hello,

My PC was down as I was surfing the net, I suddenly encountered crash of firefox, then 15 seconds later the screen turned black and monitor went to standby mode. The power was still on.

I forced to shut it down by pressing power button for a few seconds, then restarted the system. It failed to start (black screen, can't enter BIOS). Even worse, as my chassis doesn't have speaker, I don't have way to do diagnostic actions.

What I observed so far.

- PSU fan's still running, and all fans are running; no strange smell
- all periphals seems got their power.
- front panel power light on
- harddisk light only blinked once or so then it's totally off

I know it's difficult to tell but if you can just let me know which component has the highest possibility of failure I will start my test to rule them out one by one.

My spec:
Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4
Athlon 64 X2 4000+
Corsair 1GB x 2 DDR2 800
PSU: SPI350PFB2 or SPI400PFB2
Video: Sapphire ATI HD 2600
2 x seagate 160GB SATA HDD
A DVD-writer
Soundblaster or Audigy sound card.

Many thanks.

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cory1234   10-19-2009 at 05:23:46 AM

Does it sound like the system is loading windows with a black screen? Have you tested a different monitor?
Tested the system with 1 stick of ram?
Tried a different video card?
If I to guess, I would suspect the video card or MB.

------------------------------ Q6600 @ 9x333, 500gb barracuda 7200.10
Gigabye DS3R P35, Evga 8800 gt
4x1gb Super Talent 800 3-3-4-8, OCZ 850w, Win 7 64

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Silver Home Brew badge shortstuff_mt   10-19-2009 at 05:44:11 AM

This checklist was created to troubleshoot problems like yours.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] t-problems

In my experience, RAM problems are the most common cause of problems like yours. Try each stick of RAM by itself first.

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chengwingsam   10-19-2009 at 08:17:23 AM

Additional clarity:-

- I never saw the BIOS screen. It never entered loading windows.
- It should have failed POST, but I have no speaker to check the beeps.

Reply to chengwingsam
Silver Home Brew badge shortstuff_mt   10-19-2009 at 05:26:45 PM

chengwingsam wrote :

I just replaced the RAM and it worked.


I'm glad to hear you solved the problem! Chalk up another "no boot" problem to faulty RAM. It's by far the most common cause of problems like this in my experience. Did you get your Corsair RAM replaced under warranty? It should have a lifetime warranty.

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