Ok. Yesterday, I left to go to work and left my computer on like I would any other day. I come home and the machine is off except the green power light is on. This confused me, so I hold the power button for 5 seconds to turn it off. I try to turn on the computer, but it won't power on. What happens is after I press the button I see the fans spin up and stop in about half a second. The thing never actually turns on. But the green power light stays on. Hmmm?? Everything inside the case is normal. I wasn't overclocking. The processor ran constantly around 115° F.

1- How did this happen??

2- More importantly, can I fix it or do I need a new processor, Mobo, etc. ??


Here are my specs should it remotely help:
AMD Athlon XP 3200
1 GB Ram
ASRock K7VT6 Mobo
Radeon 9800 Pro 256 Meg
200 GB WD HDD

Diagnose as you go, first strip it down to the base necessary to boot:

Leave in the video card, chip, ram... pull everything else: the hard drives, and any PCI card. Also, reset the BIOS. If you can't find the jumper, just pull the battery (while its unplugged), and wait about 20 seconds. If it doesn't boot from there, start swapping out parts, video card... might want to try an old PCI one, different RAM, etc...

Cheers,

Finegan

Yeah, I was hoping someone had any direct experience with these symtoms before I have to troubleshoot it so monotonously. Right now I don't have that kind of time with work and school. I was wondering if anyone who has seen something like this happen could suggest something in particular to do until I get the time to dig into the matter.

This happened to me after a power outage once. I just pulled the battery, touched the prongs together to drain the power (you may have to wait for a minute), and put the battery back. All was fixed.

Which prongs are you referring to?

Some motherboards have a header where you can move a jumper to reset the BIOS configuration. Check your motherboard manual.

On some motherboards if the BIOS can not sense the CPU fan is spinning it will shut down the PC and nor will it allow it to powerup.

I'm talking about the prongs on the battery socket. I don't know about your motherboard, but my battery is a big watch battery. If you remove my battery, there is just enough give to be able to push the battery socket prongs together, draining any leftover power.

Ok, I tried that. I removed the CMOS battery, and touched the prongs together. After that, I even used the jumper to reset the BIOS. It acts the same still. For the one half second that power is on I can see the fans, incuding the CPU fan, move. Further ideas?

How old is the box? I had a similar problem some time ago, turned out the power supply was bad, it had just enough life to light the power light, but not enough to drive everything. You can test it with a fluke, using this

http://peripherals.about.com/cs/buil...cpowerdiag.htm

good luck.

I've had the case and power supply for about a month and a half.

I had some problems where my fan on the cpu had failures because of dust. Try vacuming the fan over the cpu, or just change it.

My troubles led to me being unable to power on the machine. Sometimes I was able to turn it on for a few secs, but then it just turned itself off. Sometimes when I was lucky it booted ok, but completely froze at some random time.

After I changed the fan, everything works fine.

Cheers,
kamstrup

I tend to agree with Peacedog that you may have a bum PSU. If you've had it for 6 weeks it may be too late to return it for an exchange, but that's what I'd try. It could also be that the mobo went south in some way too, but I'd suspect that based on your description it's more likely to be the power supply. Does it smell smoky or like burned plastic? If so, that's could be the clincher. Good luck with it -- J.W.

Indeed it would appear that it is the power supply. I checked the PS with a voltmeter and it shows no reading. I know that the meter works having used it on something else. It does show a negative 0 when I put it on there though. I would guess this tells me that the thing is completely shot. Time to bring another PS to check it out I guess.

That happened to me a few months ago. I pulled my processor off and there was a big dark spot in the middle. I took the motherboard to the store with me to see if there might be a problem with that, and even though it appeared to work, several capacitors on the motherboard were leaking. I think the capacitors had blown a long time ago, and eventually fried the processor. System works fine with new mobo and processor.

Edit: power supply works great, no problems.

Well, if you bet on the power supply as the cause, you won. I replaced the PS and the machine now powers up. I initially had a problem where the machine wouldn't go any farther that the initial BIOS post. I couldn't figure out what was going on because the error code the bios displayed was different each time I turned it on. I reseated the RAM and tried different configurations of the different components, but it wouldn't boot. Later, I noticed that it booted normally when I unplugged the LAN cable from the on-board LAN plug. Also, a side affect when it was plugged in, it showed that I had around 1MB (!!) of RAM. But when unplugged, my 1 GB is detected.

Question #1: what about the on-board LAN would keep it from booting & why does that affect detection of RAM??

I dual boot Win XP Prof & Mandrake 10.0. Windows is fine, but Mandrake won't boot up. It says something about a new USB device being detected and then it locks.

Question #2: would putting USB devices into different USB ports by accident have caused this??

Can anyone explain this strange behavior? And why would a failed power supply have caused this??