Boot problems

[kakerot79]

I was wondering if anyone could help me diagnose this problem my friend has with her computer:
She said she was sitting next to her computer, doing homework and all of the sudden it seemed to crash for no reason. When she tried to reboot the system would not boot. The psu fan comes on, but no beeping, no picture, no sounds of the hard drive clicking away. All of her drives have power, and I even tried switching out the psu and video card from my working computer while all of the other expansion cards were taken out, but no luck. I also tried clearing the bios settings just in case, but still nothing except the psu fan. The CPU heatsink/fan and other fans on the motherboard also still work. She is running an abit motherboard (maybe KT7 or something?) with an athlon thunderbird 900MHz. The computer is about a year and a half old if that matters. I am thinking that her motherboard must have gone bad somehow, but I was wondering if anyone had any insight.

 

[KevG]

This could be many problems, However, it is more likely to be the motherboard at fault.
I have seen PSU's cause this problem, where fans and HDD's are still being powered up, but because +5V was OV, nothing else would work. (Fans and HDD motors use +12V). Memory could also cause the fault, but usually you would get a series of beeps.

 

[kakerot79]

Thanks for the help! I suspect it is the motherboard because I have already tried swithing out power supplies. I wonder if it could be the CPU though?

 

[absentminded]

Hey Kakerot79,

you could try installing her hard drive in your computer to find out if the hard drive is still working. You mentioned that you do not hear the hard drive when you turn on the machine....

 

[kakerot79]

I would have thought that the computer would still boot up even if the hard drive was bad. It seems like it would do a memory check before figuring out if there is a hard drive and what state it is in. However, I get nothing. You could be right though.