System worked yesterday, now doesn't boot

[Rottie00]

Hello,

I built my system from scratch, and it has been working fine
for about two months. I usually leave it up 24/7, and went to bed last night with it happily crunching away on seti@home and gnapster up and running. But this morning, I discovered my computer was off. No, we didn't have a storm last night, and no other appliances/computers in the house indicated there was a power outage. When I hit the power button this morning, the cpu fans started up, I heard the hard drive do it's initial whirring, and then... nothing. The monitor remained blank, and it just sat there. After trying a few more times, still the same situation. I tried reseating the memory, and that didn't work. The monitor is fine, and I figure if the video card died, then I should still hear the hard drive start going when the OS starts loading after POST, but I don't hear anything from the hard drive after the initial spin on power-up. So I figure either the mobo died, the cpu died, or the memory died. I don't *think* the power supply died, is that possible if the cpu fans still go upon flicking the switch, and the lights come on? Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated... (I'm not overclocking either)

System:
800MHz Athlon TBird
256M Atlas Precision CAS2 RAM (single stick)
Abit KT7 mobo
GeForce 256 GTS 32M video card (creative labs annihilator2)
Fortron 300W power supply
(I think that is all that's relevant)

Thanks in advance,
John

 

[Pretender]

I agree with your analysis, but I don't think the mobo is dead. If you can, try to start it with the bare essentials (video card, memory, cpu) and see if it works. If not, swap out each of those until it does work. I don't think there's enough information here to be able to determine the problem part right now.

 

[Rottie00]

OK, seems the problem was a really loose network card. I went to remove everything but the vid card, cpu, and memory, and found that the network card was nearly out of the PCI socket. Must have gotten that way when I was setting up an old 486 as a router/ip_masquerader and constantly plugging/unplugging the network cable from my pc last week. Anyways, it's working fine now.

-John