Computer dead?

[cecaraway]

I have a computer that I am working on for a friend that will not boot. It is a Packard Bell S606 with a 233mhz processor, 32 mb of ram, 4.3 gig hdd, 2 mb on board video and onboard sound, a 56k 2x modem and a 50x cd rom running windows 95. When starting up I get the one beep at post, the noise like it is running the memory check and the hard drve,floppy and cd rom led's all light up. The fan is running on the processor, but no video on screen, the amber light on monitior stays lit, I have tested it on 2 monitors. I installed a ati xpert 128 pci video card and got the same results. I haev tried swapping the ram and no luck, I have disabled all hardware that can be disabled. I have reseated the processor and cleared the cmos. I removed the ram completely and tried booting and got the long beeps, so I know the board can recognize the chip. Please help! Thanks in advance for any replies.
Chris

[nunyadam]

did you disable the onboard video when you tryed the other card?

[cadetstimp]

Just a guess but here's a few things to try:

1. Temporarily disconnect IDE cables. A backwards or bad IDE cable can cause funny stuff to happen.

2. If there are two sticks of RAM try removing one. Retry. You can use one stick at a time and alternate slots to see if the problem follows a particluar bad stick of ram.

[cecaraway]

I have not been able to get into the bios to disable the onboard video and am unable to find a jumper on the board to disable it. The other stick of ram I tried is a known good stick of ram so I do not think it is that. I do not understand why I am not getting any kind of a beep code when booting other than the normal short beep. Thanks for your replies.
Chris

[mickwish]

Does is seem to go through normal statup - but no video?
Sound like either monitor or video output. And as video is onboard maybe there is a problem. Can you try another PCI video cardin a different slot?

Also, does monitor power on when you start up? Is monitor powered through PS - if so, try separate power cord in case PS is faulty for monitor supply.

Just some thoughts...

[cecaraway]

I think it is the onboard video, I have already tried a pci video card, but without being able to see the bios I cannot disable the onboard video. I have tried 2 monitors of my own so that is not the problem. I am going to try to talk them into building a new machine since prices are so low, I appreciate all of the responses.
Chris

[sharder8]

I would still try a couple different sticks of RAM. Reason being, I usually only run Micron in my machine, but I picked up a couple sticks of cheap PNY for the kids machines. They wouldn't allow boot on the Epox board. Would boot, but had problems on the IBM board. No boot on the MSI board. But the Tekram and HP boards loved them.

I've noticed the samething with a couple other brands as well.

Harder

BTW, slots and mixing/no mixing mad no difference.

[PonzSpyder]

Funny thing, I just had this same problem and found this thread in a search. It was the RAM.

Same thing happened: Black screen on boot but monitor "green" light came on to show it was receiving signal, one single beep on initial boot, had installed a cd-rom recently ( not sure if that one matters ), took out RAM and got correct error beeps, reseated just about everything with no luck, switched video card & CD-ROM with a no go.

In the end I swaped the RAM with a stick from another PC and whala!, I am back in business

[PonzSpyder]

Oh, wait...... maybe I spoke too soon

I had gotten to the BIOS for the first time so I though all was going well but it turns out that the BIOS only showed up this time because I changed the amount of RAM. What to do... this is not good

Now I get the same black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left corner... but not able to run any command or anything, it just blinks.

[Underclocked]

You might try to give yourself a "keyboard error" by either leaving the keyboard disconnected or by continuously pressing random keys during boot. Usually a keyboard error will tell you what key to press to enter setup.

[PonzSpyder]

Nah, I got past it now...

This was a PC that my boss had at home, he brought it back in so I could set it up for a new employee. Well, I come to find out that somehow he tried installing Win98 overtop of Win2k with the primary partition formatted NTFS... basically the whole thing was messed up so I created a Win2k boot disk and loaded up a new copy of the OS on a newly formatted and partitioned hard drive. ( no, there were not any important files on it )

The solution was easier than I thought, heh

[Ming]

I have had the same experience about a month ago. It happened right after a bad powersurge. Fortunately I had a 5v light that went green to amber and back. The mobo was dead. Other things that could be wrong is a card is not installed properly, and it shorts the mobo. If a card isn't inserted in the motherboard properly, it will short the board so it can't boot. Another thing could be the motherboard mounting, but if you haven't pulled the motherboard out, I would doubt that that could be it. Unfortunately the only way I knew of diagnosing the motherboard being dead was a process of elimination. The processor, the memory, the powersupply, and the graphics card all worked on other machines.