At least, I think the thread title is accurate. Basically, I’m looking for advice on how to diagnose the problem described therein. My computer (not this one, of course) will power on but just sort of hang immediately; all the various fans will spin and the DVD and Hard Drive access lights will keep flashing at the same constant rate of about twice a second, but nothing will display to the monitor, there are no beeps, nothing. I can’t even open the DVD drive, it’s so hung. I’ve opened the tower up and nothing looks loose or disconnected, thus exhausting my store of ideas. What should I do to make progress on figuring this out?
(No, I haven’t changed any hardware or settings or anything recently. I did bang lightly on the tower while starting up because the power key had gotten a little jammed and needed to be popped back out, but that was very minor and hardly seems likely to have caused anything…)
If the keyboard lights (scroll lock etc) and/or the power light is flashing, that might be an indication of what’s wrong, but you’ll have to look up your BIOS/motherboard documentation to find out what it means.
ETA: if that doesn’t help, I’d suggest disconnecting all cdrom/hard drives to see if it boots through the BIOS then. It might be a faulty drive cable or a misbehaving drive, which is fairly easy and cheap to fix.
Hm. I had just assumed they were flashing because it kept trying to access the hard drive and DVD drive like at the start of a normal boot, only it was stuck for some reason.
The keyboard isn’t lighting up, incidentally, even if I manually press NumLock or whatever. It does normally flash all three lights once while booting up, but it isn’t doing that now.
I did try disconnecting all the DVD and hard drives (one each), but it didn’t change anything; in fact, the Hard Drive access light on the tower continued to flash as it was, though the light on the DVD drive of course ceased to do anything.
Hm… I tried disconnecting all the drives again, and then for a little while the power button ceased to do anything at all, even after reconnecting all the drives, marking dishearteningly negative progress. Then I unplugged and replugged the power supply (which I’d tried before to no avail), and now, all of a sudden, everything works again. Weird. Well, at least it’s fixed, I suppose…
Thanks, though, as my problem seems to have spontaneously fixed itself (maybe what was going on the whole time was a flaky power supply which just got its act back together? Would that make any sense?), perhaps I should have a mod close this thread.
[This thread probably makes the problem look amusingly transient, but I seriously spent hours this morning trying to figure this out. Maybe that makes it even more amusing…]
Hard drives can fail for many reasons. You’re best off having an off-line backup (i.e. something that makes backups on removable media / external hard drives, or off-site via the internet).
One clue may be the sticky power-on button you mentioned in your OP. Often a sticking button confounds people, but as you were smart enough to check and and pop it out, that is good.
i am wondering, howevever if the button is defective and/or the cable from it to the power supply may be. i’d check out both if the problem recurs. If it does, pull the two wires to it off and touch them together. If that works, it is the button. If not, replace the wires.
Let’s hope it never happens again. Like cats, computers is weird. "D
Any kind of nasty reset/lockup at an unfortunate time can make your hard drive unusable or at least destroy a couple of files - even though it usually doesn’t happen. If I were you I’d make a backup ASAP (preferably on some other drive so if that fails you still have your old backup).
I have a vintage laptop I use for some specific MS DOS applications I need at work. It would not start a couple of weeks ago, and I was able to trace the failure to the CMOS battery. This is a small coin shaped battery on the motherboard.