Hi all. This is really a non-Linux hardware question, but I'm hoping someone here wouldn't mind pointing me in the right direction.

The problem: my system, which has been rock-solid for three years, one day simply wouldn't boot. I got no POST, no BIOS report, no memory check, absolutely nothing but a blank screen. The power comes on, the fans all come on, the LEDs all come on, but nothing happens. No beep codes, either. Just nothing. I checked the monitor on another computer, and it works.

So I switched it off and left it alone for about 6 weeks, and then yesterday I tried it again (after tearing it down and plugging everything back in, so it's not a loose cable issue), and this time it came on, went through the POST just fine, and made it all the way to GRUB. It defaulted to Ubuntu, and then about 6 lines into Ubuntu's startup, it hung. I rebooted, and was right back to the blank screen.

The system:
Home-brew
Asus P4P800 MoBo
Pentium 4 Prescott CPU, ~2.8 GHz or so
Antec 450 watt PSU
2 gigs of Kingston Hyper X memory
3 HDDs and 1 DVD drive, all IDE

Clearly it's hardware failure, but I'm hoping for some advice narrowing it down, so I won't have to replace everything. Should I start with the PSU? The MoBo? The CPU? I had the brilliant idea this morning that maybe it was just the CMOS battery, but research suggests that prolly isn't it. (I would love if it were, though.)

Thanks in advance for any replies.

--jim

Replacing the cmos battery is the least expensive option, one I would do anyway. You could either try a power supply from another machine or buy another one (the former being my choice). There's also a possibility that the monitor cable is faulty either at the plug to the graphics card or the cable itself. Perhaps running a memtest to check for a failing memory chip could help.

Nexus,

Thanks for the advice. I think I'll rip open an older box that isn't doing anything right now and try to switch out the battery and then the PSU, to at least eliminate those as possibilities before I start spending money. My guess is that it's the Mobo/CPU somehow, but I just can't be sure.

Thanks again!

--jim