Something wrong with the wife's computer. But what?

April 3, 2013 6:40 PM

So, my wife's computer stopped booting the other day. Nothing happening on the monitor, hard drive whirrs away in a repetitive pattern for as long as we want to let it go.

Tonight I took everything apart blew out all the dust. Put the bare minimum back together (monitor plugged into mother board) and tried to boot. Error code, 1 long 2 short. Duh! Put memory back in. Now I get the first part of the normal boot sequence. Yay!

Add hard drive. Nada. Putting my ear up against the hard drive rewards me with with a very quite pew pew noise. Think it's curtains for Mr. Hard drive but putting it in the drive dock on my computer let's me read it just fine (am backing up all the important stuff now).

OK, without the hard drive I plugged in the video card and plugged monitor into that. Back to getting nothing on the screen.

I'm pretty certain this means that the problem is that some portion of the mother board is no longer doing it's thing, but I'm hardly an expert in such things, so if there's something I'm missing I'm all ears. Wife would like to get back on line.

Board is an ASUS M3A78-EM if that helps.

posted by Kid Charlemagne to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: Hmm. Motherboard is unlikely to spontaneously fail in a way that lets you get halfway through the boot process (like, it goes through memory test and such?) -- a blown logic board tends to be all or nothing. Also, if the hard drive works in a different PC, then it shouldn't cause any issues on this PC. Two ideas:

1. Some catastrophic software mess has screwed up the installed OS. You can test this by getting Linux on a USB stick or DVD and seeing if you can boot into that.

2. Power supply is failing and not delivering enough power to components. Probably the system would not let you boot into on OS from USB if this were the case. Though I'm not sure.

2.5 double check the power and data connections to the hard drive.
posted by PercussivePaul at 6:58 PM on April 3, 2013

Response by poster: And I just happened to have a spare power supply upstairs and....it works. I thank you and my wife thanks you!
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 7:18 PM on April 3, 2013