Dell Vostro 230 Boot Issues

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officevision

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Feb 11, 2015
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I have a Dell Vostro 230 that will not boot. A while ago the system was running but very sluggish. It reported 1 GB of RAM but 2 GB were installed. I powered the system down to troubleshoot and now when I press the power button the processor and case cooling fans will briefly spin and then stop and then start again. The hard drives spins up and the DVD drive will spin if any media is in the drive. Unfortunately, that is where it ends. I have reseated all cables. I pulled each 1GB memory stick and swapped slots. I pulled memory from a working system and still nothing. If I try to boot with no memory, I get two beeps. I also swapped the hard drive with a working system and get nothing. No splash screen, no messages, nothing. Are there any troubleshooting steps I am missing?
 
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officevision

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Feb 11, 2015
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No joy testing with a known working PSU. While the system does behave differently with the "new" PSU, it still will not go through a POST. With the old PSU when I pushed the power button the cooling fans would spin for a second, stop and then start up again. With the new PSU, they start and stay spinning. That's about the only difference, I'm afraid.
 
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officevision

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Feb 11, 2015
3
0
4,510
Update - removed or disconnected hard drive and DVD drive. Removed both memory sticks, pulled jumpers from CMOS and BIOS Password jumpers. Let system sit for a couple of hours. Re-connected all of above and fired up. System went through a POST! Set Date and Time in BIOS and restarted. HDD Windows image was NG. Boot from Windows install disk - now installing Windows. System is working like nothing ever happened. I believe the answer was to clear the BIOS. I know on HP Business systems, there is a button on the mainboard to clear error conditions that sometimes keep a system from returning to working mode. You push the button to clear the error and reboot. That often solves the problem of a system not POSTing.
 
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