Got up this morning to find the HDD light on all the time and the (empty) CD drive light blinking. It will start to boot as normal sometimes, and I have had a look around the BIOS to see if I could check temperatures (this one runs 24/7) but it all looks fine. After between 30 seconds and a minute the lights start again and the monitor signal is lost. I tried booting from a floppy but it doesn't get that far.

Anyone have any ideas please?

 

bttt

 

bttt for the Monday morning IT crowd.

 

Sounds pretty drastic.....Does it post at all? - if not it either (and it's difficult to pin it down further):-

1 - Processor failed (will not even post)
2 - Motherboard failed
3 - RAM failed

Without swapping out components for known good units, you can't usually tell which is causing the fault.

 

Thanks for the input. It does post, but the exact place where it suspends operations seems to vary. Since it has three memory sticks in I can play around with them tonight to see if one is faulty.

Could it be the PSU providing an unreliable supply?

 

Its possible it could be the PSU - i had one once where I would have sworn it was a mobo problem - ended up to be the PSU. Mind you they usually just fail, the fans run, but it won't post. Again without swapping it out you can't really tell.

I dont suppose you are getting any beep errors are you?

If you are you can tell by the number and duration of the beeps what the problem is.

Try leaving all but one stick of your ram out, and swap them around to test them.

Good luck

 

Cheers Dr Hu, I have a spare PSU I can try tonight, and will also swap the memory around.