computer wont boot

[cornercuttinjoe]

I have no clue on what to do here.

Here's the skinny:

I have a dell dimension 8200 thats pretty stock except for some extra RAM. It has worked fine since I have had it (it was a hand me down), and everything has been cool.

Today I tried to start it up, and it is giving me attitude. When I turn it on, it beeps at me 5 times, then beeps some more at me a little randomly, and then it just sits there. The light on the power button stays lit, but the screen never shows anything, not even the bios booting up or anything.

So i figured, what the hell, and i swapped out the video card from another computer, just to see what happens. No improvement.

Do you think that this is a hard drive failure?

I can't think of there being anything else wrong with it.

I appreciate any help. Take it easy...

 

[jac006]

what did you last on your comp? did you shut down or just pull the plug? it could be the monitor itself, or is the monitor working? of course, if uve never heard these beeps, i dunno. it could just be an old comp too. how long have u had it?

 

[cornercuttinjoe]

i haven't started it up in a while, maybe a month. I think the last time it was shut down was when the power went out, so it probably wasn't shut down properly. I know its not the monitor, because it works for other computers.

as far as the history of the computer, it was my mothers and then she gave it to me about 6 months ago, so I have had it for that long. I have SUSE Enterprise Server running on it, and it has always worked great.

The computer's input comes from a KVM switch, but I know that the port I use for this particular computer works, because I have tested on a different computer.

The more I think about it, the more this seems like a hard drive failure problem to me. I am still not sure though. The only hard drive crashes I have ever had were on laptops, so the symtoms were a little different.

Thanks for any help...

 

[jac006]

maybe a faulty curcuit? or what? hmmm... yeah, it's prolly a hd failure. try getting a new hd and install suse on it and see waht happens. and try taking the hd out and putting it on another comp, if you can...

 

[cornercuttinjoe]

yeah, im going to try to set it up as another drive on another computer and see if it works. ill post what i find, probably because it wont work and the hard drive will be fine and then i will have to really figure out what is wrong.

 

[jac006]

sounds good. hope you find out what was wrong. or not, i hope that we can solve the problem at least, or whatever. lol.

 

[IAntDemo]

ITS possibly your CPU

 

[Jesusfrk611]

This problem sounds similar to a problem I had when I tried installing more RAM (I'm not sure if you have installed any more RAM). I started it up again and the screen was blank and I heard the beeping and the power supply fan on. I later figured out that I used the wrong kind of RAM on it and it screwed up the motherboard.

 

[cornercuttinjoe]

well, the drive is healthy. i plugged it in as a slave drive on another computer, and it works fine, which now that i think about it, that makes sense, because i tried to boot up in knoppix from the cdrom, but it wont even let me do that. and the hard drive isnt needed for knoppix.

when i turn the power on, nothing goes to the screen. no dell logo, pretty much like its getting no signal. but i know its not the video card.

the ram is good. its using the right kind. the ram hasn't been switched for over a year probably. i dunno what it could be.

any ideas on what i can do next to diagnose the problem.

thanks for any help...

 

[Jesusfrk611]

Then it seems to be a motheboard or processor related problem.