Computer Not Starting!!

billiejeansonmac

windows 2000 sp4/ Xp sp2

Intel motherboard and Celeron chip. I can't get it to power on, but the indicator lights are on on the motherboard. Any help would be appreciated. This is my last PC and I can't just move the hard drive to my 44 pin IBM laptop.

-billiejeansonmac

ubuntuxp

Does anything show up on the screen?

BigCJ

Listen for beeps. If it beeps, look up the pattern of beeps with the model of PC you have, and you should find out what's wrong with it.

billiejeansonmac

No beeps. I'll check the screen. Are hard drives transferable?

yourepicfailure

Check video. By motherboard lights do you mean status lights(e.g. hdd indicator) or lights physically on the board?

BigCJ

billiejeansonmac wrote:

Are hard drives transferable?

Depends on what you mean by transferrable. If it can physically connect to a PC with a primary disk and OS that support the file system, yes you can read/write the disk. Just make sure any jumpers are set properly. If it doesn't connect physically, use an adapter. If you mean "will the OS boot on a different computer?" the answer is probably no. Operating systems don't like to boot on computers they weren't originally installed on. Of course, there are rare exceptions when this does work. I had an Acer laptop die, and I popped the drive into the HP laptop we've been discussing in this thread and it actually booted fine.

calvinb

Well, that's mostly old Windows. As long as the disk configuration is mostly the same, modern Windows and Linux don't have any troubles booting - I even took a disk with Windows 7 on it from a PC with an AMD board to an Intel one, and all the drivers just worked after the swap. (Even if not, it's usually minor surgery; offline registry edit for boot disk drivers on Windows, editing the bootloader config on Linux.)

Older non-PC computers like Macs were even better about this.

billiejeansonmac

yourepicfailure wrote:

By motherboard lights do you mean status lights(e.g. hdd indicator) or lights physically on the board?

Yes there is a green status light on the motherboard. It turns off once unplugged... Thanks everyone. It is (sadly) a Windows 2000 and XP dual boot.
Cheers

English Invader

POST issues can be a real pain. It generally means the motherboard is on the way out but one trick a friend taught me was to plug all the connectors in, pull them out again and then plug them back in. This gets rid of any oxidisation in the ports and kind of jolts the system back into action.

66659hi

Most likely your motherboard is gone. I guess it's kind of unfortunate but I'm sure you can get some form of cheap (or even free) old machine. I've gotten a couple core 2 duo desktops, an athlon xp desktop, and a pentium 4 desktop all for free in the past. Just ask around. Whatever you get is likely to be more powerful too.

billiejeansonmac

It was a Celeron with Intel mb. How do I get important files off it?

KCompRoom2000

If you're willing to resurrect it with a new motherboard, Socket 478 and LGA775 motherboards are pretty cheap on eBay, Maybe you can reuse your Celeron CPU on another motherboard to save money if you go that route (as long as the CPU isn't the problem in this situation).

If all you really wanted to do was backup the data from the hard drive, You can get an IDE-to-USB adapter to plug the drive into another computer without having to take it apart, This should be enough to allow you to backup the data to another medium (such as your main system's hard drive, an external hard drive, or even a flash drive depending on the size of this drive).

If you're in the market for another vintage system, You can always ask someone you know to see if they're getting rid of their old computer, maybe check a local recycling center to see if they have something (RE-PC could be a good place to start if you live in Seattle), or as a last resort you can always buy an old system on eBay.