Need some advice. Not sure what's wrong.

Kelemvor

Lifer
May 23, 2002
16,928
8
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I picked up a PC from a friend who thought the HDD was bad. I have a few extras laying around so thought I'd revive it. The PC is a Medion PC MT6 which is a P4 2.66.

Problem is I can't get it to boot up at all. I tried to boot from an XP Setup CD and it just would hang. I tried multiple hard drives, swapped the memory, swapped the CD Drive, and tried multiple CDs. Most of the time the CD boots, starts going through the Windows setup screens and then just hangs part way through as on the bottom of the screen is says Loading something. It always gets stuck at different places.

I can't seem to figure out how to get into the BIOS as when I turn it on, I get a Pentium 4 symbol in the middle of the screen and it then tries to boot up. Tried F1, F2, and Del and couldn't get anything to work.

Looking for any advice on other things I could try.

I looked at the MB to try to figure out what it is and it says N1996. Not sure if I can find a bootable BIOS upgrade CD but could try that. There's no floppy in this either.

Thanks for any help.
 

CurseTheSky

Diamond Member
Oct 21, 2006
5,401
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0
Sounds like a dying PSU or bad memory to me, though it could be a BIOS setting or the motherboard.

If you have a spare PSU or memory laying around I'd try that first. Other than that, maybe try a Linux live CD like Ubuntu?
 

phaxmohdem

Golden Member
Aug 18, 2004
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www.avxmedia.com
Second on the PSU suggestion... that is always a good place to start for flakey systems.

I would also recommend giving the motherboard a thorough inspection to see if there are leaky capacitors present. (You will see the tops of them bulged outwards (convex) and possibly some brown gunk oozing out/crusted on top of them if that is the case). If so, unless you're the master of all things solder... you'll want a new mobo likely.
 

DSF

Diamond Member
Oct 6, 2007
4,902
0
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If you can get something like the Ultimate Boot CD to load, it wouldn't hurt to run Memtest.
 

Kelemvor

Lifer
May 23, 2002
16,928
8
81
I have a mem tester that can boot to itself. Looked like something wasn't happy which is why I pulled memory from my known good machine and popped it in here just in case.

I'll try a different PSU tonight and see what happens.