Comp won't POST...lights are on but no one's home
Hi guys, sorry, this would normally not be an emergency, but this is a rig I've built to donate to a lad in my building whose mom can't afford a computer for him, and I wanted to get it ready by tomorrow. 
I bought it used, and threw a couple spare components of my own into it. Here's the deal, it turns on, the lights are on on the motherboard, the system fans are spinning, but that's it. It won't POST, no beeps of any kind, and there's no power going to the hdd or the optical drive. Both are sitting quietly, but I tested both in my computer, and both work.
I assumed it was the bios, but it's a gigabyte board with the dual bios chip setup, and although there's instruction on resetting the cmos jumper on the board, there's no jumpers to fiddle with. I also tried pulling the cmos battery, leaving it for hours, then putting it back in. I then tested a new battery to no avail. I've pulled everything including the ram and video card to see if I could force an error beep out of the thing but nothing works. I hit the power button, the power supply kicks in, the fans spin, the light on the mobo is on, but that's it. FYI the ribbon cables are new.
The basic specs are:
Socket A gigabyte ddr board (onboard sound)
1 gig athlon t-bird
512 megs ddr1 ram
tnt2 nvidia vid card
DLink nic
ATI tv tuner card
30 gig maxtor hdd
Samsung dvd-rom drive
I'd really appreciate your help guys, I've fiddled with this for three nights, and I've run out of ideas. This machine is going to a good kid who just happened to have things a bit harder than he deserves, and I'd like to be able to give it to him soon.
Cheers,
Sean
I bought it used, and threw a couple spare components of my own into it. Here's the deal, it turns on, the lights are on on the motherboard, the system fans are spinning, but that's it. It won't POST, no beeps of any kind, and there's no power going to the hdd or the optical drive. Both are sitting quietly, but I tested both in my computer, and both work.
I assumed it was the bios, but it's a gigabyte board with the dual bios chip setup, and although there's instruction on resetting the cmos jumper on the board, there's no jumpers to fiddle with. I also tried pulling the cmos battery, leaving it for hours, then putting it back in. I then tested a new battery to no avail. I've pulled everything including the ram and video card to see if I could force an error beep out of the thing but nothing works. I hit the power button, the power supply kicks in, the fans spin, the light on the mobo is on, but that's it. FYI the ribbon cables are new.
The basic specs are:
Socket A gigabyte ddr board (onboard sound)
1 gig athlon t-bird
512 megs ddr1 ram
tnt2 nvidia vid card
DLink nic
ATI tv tuner card
30 gig maxtor hdd
Samsung dvd-rom drive
I'd really appreciate your help guys, I've fiddled with this for three nights, and I've run out of ideas. This machine is going to a good kid who just happened to have things a bit harder than he deserves, and I'd like to be able to give it to him soon.
Cheers,
Sean
0
Comments
Possibly...but if it were the power supply, the mobo is still getting power even if (in theory) the molex strings were dead. Shouldn't it at least POST? I'll test another power supply and reply again.
I have no clue...I've never worked with a Gigabyte board. Do you mean the lack of jumpers could mean they've been knocked off? I don't think so, there's no broken pieces of jumper leads or any indication the board suffered damage.
In the instructions for clearing the CMOS, does it say you need to move jumpers?
If yes, when you say no jumpers, are there literally no jumper locations on the board or are there just none of the little plastic "jumpers"?
If there are pins, but no jumpers, yes this could be part of the problem.
2)
If jumpers are not the issue, how many sticks of ram are installed? Remove all but 1 leaving it in the slot closest to the CPU. Test each available stick in this slot to see if one of them (if you have multiple) is causing the problem.
3)
This is demonstrated on an OCZ Power Supply, but it works on 90%+ units on the market: Disconnect the PSU from everything (wall, mobo, etc) ...then plug the unit back into the wall socket and connect a couple hard drives to a molex connector to provide a load.
Now....with the switch on the back of the PSU in the off position...locate the Dark Green wire in the ATX connector and using a paper clip (or something similar) "jump it" to any of the black wires in the connector....Now flip the switch on the back to On.......the PSU should start up and run.
Pictures of the jumpstart are here: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5577
Then when you have it running, measure the voltages (if you can get/have a digital multimeter) as shown here: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7069
That will tell you if what is going on with the PSU.
Ryder, btw to answer your questions, yea, there were no pins on the board where it mentioned the instructions. Weird eh? Also, it had two 256 meg ram sticks, both of which I tried shuffling to no avail, and in the end, as I mentioned, the generic PS it had was dodgy and/or didn't give enough cranking power to keep up.
Thank you so much for your help guys, not to be cheesy, but you gave a young boy a fighting chance.