Computer Problem

Were you recently inside your computer? There are beeps and other signals that can tell you what is happening. Google is a good start. Normally if you disturbed your memory you will get several beeps and nothing will happen, No screen, Natta.

Try resetting your memory first and get back to us.

Sounds like you killed your hard drive!!!

You're probably right, but seems like firmware would give a terse message like "drive not found" or "boot sector bad", etc.

When the hard drive bites the dust big time, seems like you get nothing from even the BIOS.

Actually, he might try hitting the correct keys to get into the BIOS and see what it says... If that doesn't work, then take a look at the power supply - that may have died.

If you do not have the small (old fashioned) speaker connected to the mainboard speaker connection (a lot of PCs are built without this 50 cent option today(?), connect a loudspeaker to the right point, switch on and count the number of beeps, look up on wikipedia or somewhere for PC POST tests and the beeps will tell you what is going wrong.

Try at this link:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-on_self-test

Or buy an MSI mainboard and the four green LEDs at the back will tell you the same!!!

Try resetting the BIOS, remove the battery for around 20 minutes or if you have the manual, check to see what jumpers need to be changed to reset it, usng the jumpers to do it is instant.

If you are completely stuck you could try a thing called Hirens boot cd, do a search for it, it has all the tools you will need to get up and running again

Good Luck :)

some puters are not worth their price, couldn't give me a Dell from hell, even if it was free

Now that IBM Think-Pads are made in China by Loveno (?), nothing but troubles - especially with hard drives. I know - in our company, everyone gets a laptop and a docking station.

On the other hand, with Dell, I think it's a matter of you get what you pay for... About five years ago, I splurged on a high-end Dell XPS desktop. It's a beast! Dual processors running at almost 4 Ghz, 2 Gigs of memory, two ultra-fast hard drives, CD/DVD read-write, high-end video card, and now that I'm working with server-farm vitalization, I find out it even came with PCI-express!!! Turned it on when I got it and it's been running ever since (knock on wood). It's a real champ considering 5 years later it's still not obsolete. That's frigging amazing as far as I'm concerned.

But, again, it wasn't cheap!!! So, I think Dell's high-end stuff works pretty well.

You didn't spill coffee on it did you? I spilled coffee on a laptop once and it messed up the motherboard. Probably not your problem if you didn't spill anything on it but it is still possible, especially if it got too hot for some reason. Is this a desktop or laptop. If it is a desktop, check your cables inside the box and make sure they are plugged in good and tight, especially your hard drive cables. With a laptop, your hard drive may have worked loose from the socket. This happened to me once on an old Thinkpad. A lot of times bad connections can really wreak havoc. Try booting from a live cd if you have one available. These are available from the internet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveDistro

Even if your hard drive is damaged you may be able to use it. I have a laptop with a damaged hard drive that works fine now. Some of the surface area of the disk was damaged due to abuse. I used fdisk to wipe the partition and reformat. The fdisk program identified the bad sectors and the hard drive never accessed them anymore. The only drawback here is that you don't have the same storage you did when the disk was new. Replacing the hard drive would probably be preferrable except that I don't really use this computer much anymore. Of course you would need a bootable cd, or floppy if that is available on your computer, with fdisk on it. Obviously you would loose all your data.

Did you get a restoration disk or cd with your computer? These will load the original OS and programs back on your hard drive. The computer would have to be able to boot from cd to do this though. I know a lot of computers now days don't come with those though. There is a seperate partition with all that stuff on it. Not a good idea in my opinion from a consumer's perspective. I miss the days when you actually got a disk with the full installable OS on it. Progress is great, ain't it? But the restoration cd can sometimes allow you to keep your data

If you are not getting anything on your screen at all it could be a problem with your display. I have a laptop that stopped displaying anything and I had to send it off to a company in Florida to get the display fixed. There was nothing wrong with anything else on the laptop though. Probably not your problem though.

If you could give more details of the symptoms that are present and a little history leading up to your problem maybe I could be more helpful. By symptoms I mean is the display backlit, do you get sounds, etc.

Swap power supplies. I just had the same problem, and it turned out there were horrendously bad capacitors. Check 'em and let us know. I thought they were all gone by now!?

I had a similar problem once. I had to buy a whole new system. Keyboard, mouse, monitor and CPU.

Yeah, it seems that if the IRS sends you a letter saying you owe them an exorbitant amount of money it has the potential to ruin your whole system.