Due to the frost I believe we have had over the last few days a cable must have come down and left us in darkness for a while. We are back up and running now. I did switch off all sockets before it came back on but on switching my main PC on all I am getting is the hard drive light flashing the processer fan is also turning every time the HD light flashes so in other words I believe it to be K-nackered.
apart from ringing my household insurance to see if it is covered from this sort of thing in the meantime is there any thing that I myself could try to get it to boot.
The PC is getting on a bit now but it was running ok for what I wanted it for and apart from anything there is quite a few things photos, music etc that I would like to retrieve. So what if anything can I do myself rather than take it and leave it anywhere.

 

Do the optical drives spin up aswell, if so the most likely culprit will be the motherboard if the machine won't post. And if it is then you can try and scour the net for a new one. If you can still get it for your computer. Or your going to have to buy a new computer or M/board, Processor and memory to go into your existing case, in which case you'll most probably need a new Licence for the operating system, unless the one that came with it hasn't been registered yet, like my in laws wasn't. If you have a listen when you switch on does it sound as the the hard drive is spinning up, with no rythmic clicking or clunking noises. If so the hard drive is most probably fine, and all you will have to do if end up getting a new computer is pluggung it into as a second drive and then all your photo's can be accessed. then you will have a computer with 2 hard drives.

Jase

 

What possibly may have happened is the BIOS settings have been cleared. It happens on mine sometimes whens its turned off suddenly. And I know the CMOS battery is good.
So your machine might be not booting because its waiting for you to confirm the settings. Try pressing delete or F2 to see if anything comes up on the screen.
If you are getting nothing on the screen, then perhaps you have an aftermarket graphics card, and the BIOS setting have defaulted to onboard graphics?

 

No drives are spinning just a burst of power to all three fans and the flashing HD light. I did read about removing the battery on the motherboard for a while to reset the CMOS, done that but still not booting, will connect it all back up and try pressing F2.

No joy with pressing F2, its a wireless keyboard and mouse and the reciever is flashing a light in sync with the HD light. If I need to put my HD into another PC as a slave how would I go about that bearing in mind mine is XP, the one I will put it into will probably be Vista.

 

Just set the HD's jumper to slave, small black plastic tab on the rear and plug it into the other PC, using another power cord n into the IDE or Sata cable connector on the PC's motherboard. Should be ok if the drive is alright.

 

Further tests seems to be motherboard, I was hoping it was the PSU but with everything disconected from it it spins ok as soon as the MB pluged in I get the flashing light and the fans pulsing.
Dont think i`ll get a MB for it as it is about 5/6 yearsold now and I dont have a OS on disk as it was preinstalled. So looks like a new PC is in order I just may have a few questions about setting my old HD as a slave as at the moment it is set to cable direct and it doesn`t say on the case which posision the jumpers should be set for it to run as a slave.

 

Pull the drive type and model number from the drive and a "+jumper settings" to a google search term and it should, hopefully, throw up the jumper settings. I know Maxtor has a few pages on their site which detail all the possible jumper settings depending on model type.

 

Just bought a new PC it is the same make as the old one, but before i plugged it in i opened it up to see if it looked the same inside.
Right the HD is now conected by a small red ribbon cable and to a differant place on the MB to the other one, but a large blue conector that the old HD was plugged into is there with nothing connected, does this mean i can plug the old HD into this with it`s own ribbon cable and set it to slave (when I find out which way the jumper must be) and switch on. I doubt weather i will leave it in permanately just untill I salvage what I want from it.