I have recently built a second PC (base unit) from spare parts including a second-hand Motherboard (Gigabyte GA-7ixe4) and CPU (Duron 850) acquired via ebay. The system powers up okay but that is all and it won't boot. I am staring at a blank screen and trying to figure out exactly what is wrong!

The symptoms are :
1 - Power switch on the front panel does nothing when pressed on/off.
Power can only be activated by using the on/off switch on the back panel of the PSU.
The PSU and it's fan, the CPU fan, Hard Drive and CDROM Drive all power up okay.
Power-on LED operates okay.
Hard Drive LED operates for a short period and then goes off.
Floppy Drive LED does not operate.
No warning beeps at any time from the system speaker.
No video display - nothing appears on screen at any time.
(video card is okay as previously tested in another machine)

It seemes likely that the problem is either the Motherboard or CPU. Does it sound as though the BIOS is screwed?

Any ideas or suggestions gratefully received.

Thanks, Alan

Sounds like hardware configuration. I'd double check any/all junpers on the MB and discharge the bios.

Remove every card that's not needed including hard drive connections (boot from floppy), If it works, add the periphials one at a time.

PS: I buy stuff on ebay and have occaisonally got crap.

I think you can remove everything(except the LED) from MB,then add display card,CPU and Power.. Then power up to see whether something could be displayed on the screen or not.

I had the same problem once. It turned out that the floppy drive was faulty. So it doesn't have to be the CPU or the MOBO.

Does the mobo manual have anything to say? Also, I hate to mention this one because it sounds ridiculous, butt the pin configuration on the pre-morgan core durons made it possible to put it in backwards quite easily. Some of the cheaper BIOSes came without a beep code for mis-seated or missing CPU.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks for the replies.

I played around with the machine all afternoon and the culprit turned out to be a new memory chip. After trying all the other things suggested I decided as a last resort to change the PC133 128MB DIMM with one that is known to be okay. Suddenly everything came on and it all appears to work okay!

Regards, Alan