5-6 year old PC won't even do a POST... now what?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve built my share of PCs from component parts, so I generally know my way around this sort of thing, but it’s been a long while – I’ve mostly used laptops over the past 5 years, and have only had to do things like upgrade memory or HDs, not deal with power supply or motherboard issues.

My home office PC for the past 5 or 6 years has been a Dell Dimension 8250. I basically only use it for web surfing, email, digital photo editing, etc. At some point I upgraded the memory to 2GB, swapped in a dual-head digital video card to support two monitors so I could work from home easier, and installed a wireless 802.11g network card after moving to a new house where it was no longer directly connected to my router.

Some time over this past summer, I noticed the wireless networking performance was getting very poor, even though the reception was fine. I chalked this up to needing a new network card.

Then, one day about 2 months ago, the PC wouldn’t boot. Not in a way I’m used to, like the hard drive having read errors or a memory check failure – it just plain did nothing. The fan whirred, the HD spun up, but that’s it. No BIOS check, no POST (Power-On Self-Test), just a dark screen. Then, a few days later, it came up just fine. But then, after one or two times of using it, it went dead again.

Hmmm. I figured it was one of three things, all of which have happened to me in the past: a fried motherboard; a failed power supply; or the CMOS battery died.

Today I got around to trying the easiest step of changing the battery. Nope.

Fried motherboard? In the past I could smell a distinctive odor of burnt silicon, similar to when a hard drive burns out (which I’ve also smelled). Nothing doing, though maybe it fried and sat so long unused that it had dissipated. Still, a visual examination showed no obviously burned out looking capacitors or anything.

Power supply failure? Well, the HD still spins up and the case fan still works. I don’t have a spare power supply to try to swap in, as the Dell case seems to have a proprietary motherboard or something, or else a type that doesn’t match any of the power supplies I have lying around. Of course, all of those are from even older systems, like Socket 7 motherboards from the late 1990s.

So I’m out of ideas now. I have no attachment to the motherboard or the case of the Dell, but I would love it if I could just boot up my hard drive without having to reinstall the O/S (I don’t even know where my Windows XP discs are since my move from one year ago).

So I ask you, my techno-savvy fellow Dopers:

1 - What should my next move be? Am I overlooking an obvious fix to try?

2 - What would it take for me to be able to transfer my existing HD to a new motherboard? It’d have to be one with the same BIOS chipset, right? A Google search indicates that it has the Intel 850E chipset; would any mobo with this chipset allow me to just plug in my HD and go? (I’ve not done this before.)

Though I guess I could just look on eBay for an exact replacement Dell Dimension 8250 motherboard. Kinda boring though.

2

Shouldn’t be a big deal. Swap out the mobo or start with a whole fresh box. As long as the new HDD controller accepts your hard drive interface (at 5-6 years old, probably EIDE) it should work no problem. If you start with a fresh box, it’ll come with a hard drive that you could set to be the “slave” drive (on the drive via jumpers and in the BIOS as well), and then you can boot right up to your old OS (with a bonus secondary drive).

3

Well, yes, the HD would be physically compatible, as in I could repartition and re-format it, or access it as a slave drive to read data files, but the OS wouldn’t boot, would it? From past experience in upgrading motherboards and trying to transfer the HD, the drivers for the new mobo wouldn’t be there, plus drivers for the other mobo components like the USB or other controllers, basically resulting in me not being able even to get into some kind of Windows safe mode to install the drivers for the new motherboard. Or maybe I just never did it quite right?

4

First rule out any other possibilities. Basically unhook absolutely every non-critical piece of hardware and see if it POSTS. Leave more-or-less just the monitor, graphics card, ram, CPU, and power supply.
You can run into some very bizarre things that prevent POST. I built a new computer a few months ago that wouldn’t POST. Turned out the be the friggan keyboard. :smack:

If it can be that it can be anything.

If possible try a different graphics card and or monitor. Hook your monitor right up to your motherboard if it has a video port on the back as some do. I’ve had more no-POSTs from graphics cards then everything else combined.

But from what you’ve written the power supply sounds like the most likely culprit to me.

I’ve never had a problem getting windows to boot by moving a drive over like this. The MOBO drivers don’t seem to be critical to getting the thing to run, they just seem to be critical to getting it to run well. But you mention having tried to do this and it not working so who’s to say really. Worth a shot if your data isn’t critical and your looking to buy a new computer anyway. But i’m guessing that isn’t likely.

Even if not you should be able to install windows over top* without losing your old files or you can run the repair installation**. Which is done by booting off the disk and at one point windows will say it has detected a previous installation and ask if you want to repair it or replace it.

However, while i’d be willing to risk any of these, and have done all of them, on my own computer i would hate for you to lose files on my advice. So i would suggest popping your hard drive into a different computer and, assuming it works, backing up all your important files first.

*in vista if it detects a previous installation while installing a new one it asks if you want to backup to old install and renames it windows.old. I don’t know if it backs up info that isn’t in the windows folder and it’s subfolders(such as desktop and documents). I can’t remember if or how this works in XP or earlier

**the repair installation is probably the easiest. Basically it installs windows over top of the old installation while preserving any user files. I’ve never tried this in vista but i’ve done it many times in XP and it’s easy as pie.

5

I agree, take everything out except the essentials, and if you have more than 1 ram module, try them all on an individual basis, it might be a memory problem.

6

RAM has always been the most often problem for me too. Vid cards second.

7

Possibly the motherboard may not be getting current from the PSU - the fan and the HDD are on separate power cables.

8

When your testing, make sure that you can hear the beep sequences that motherboards make when they aren’t working well enough to post. Most of them do it out of the PC speaker (if installed), but if your motherboard has onboard sound, it may actually send beeps (or a synthesized voice) out the headphone jack.

9

No, no beeping. Nothing but fan whirr and a brief moment of the hard drive head spinning.

The motherboard doesn’t have an on-board video chip so I’ll try unseating the memory first. Though in the past, if I had a memory chip go bad, it would fail the mem check during POST and not prevent the POST itself. (I have had the PC fail to POST due to putting a memory module in wrong when installing it, but that’s not true in this case.)

10

>> I basically only use it for web surfing, email, digital photo editing, etc.

Probably your best bet at this point is to get data that you want to save from the hard drive. I second Spectralist’s last suggestion of putting the hd as a slave drive in another machine and pull what you need from it to the new hd. If you have a multimeter, you can check if the yellow power connector cables have 12 V DC and the red have around 5. (The 2 black wires in the middle are grounds). Bear in mind that these voltages can vary quite a bit from these numbers and the PC still work.
As you note, Dell cases tend to have a proprietary design and use hard-to-find motherboards as well. After 5 - 6 years, capacitors dry out, transient brownouts wreak havoc on various components, etc. A motherboard can easily be “fried” without any visible sign of damage (or smellable either). From your description of the way it stopped working, it sounds like this is probably the case.
The first thing seen on bootup is information about the graphics chipset - if this is not seen, it’s a pointer to something wrong there. However, you should get a beep code or at least see the hd activity LED still flashing intermittently as the hd is read. Again, after this length of time it’s probably best to get a new PC and save what you can from the old hd.

11

Capacitors sometimes blow, my last PC died with very similar symptoms due to one dead capacitor on the motherboard. A visual inspection found the culprit.