major computer woes

[mskin]

having a disastrous hardware week.

 

1. bought a new monitor. very excited when it came a day early. powered my computer down and plugged in new monitor. upon reboot, the fans blew for about three seconds and the machine went down. no POST, nothing. assumed my power supply died or my mother board toasted (asus P5N-E). so, i bought new motherboard. installed it, and the same thing happened. so i went out to by a new power supply. installed, and the same thing happened. maybe i toasted the new mother board, i don't know? any thoughts on this would be helpful.

 

2. wanted to retrieve some files from one of my sata drives from toasted machine. pulled it out, and slipped it into a Vista machine i've got laying around. the bios picked it up, but it did not show up in my computer as a drive. disk management told has it labled as "dynamic" and offline. doesthis mean i fried all the data on it? or is there some trick to getting it to read as basic without reformatting it?

 

thanks

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

1) Honestly never heard of a monitor frying a mb.

 

2) Can you just right click in disk management and tell it to mount the disk or something like that. It should still hold all the data. ...though I don't want to be held responsible.

[mskin]

thanks crazy. i've never heard of it before either. the only thing is, the machine was on, i shut it down properly, plugged in the monitor - and that was it. the only thing i can think of is that static electricity may have built up during shipping and released when i plugged it in?

 

the machine will not even POST. further reading at ASUS website indicates that the machine will not POST if a graphics card isn't present. perhaps i fried the graphics card and not the motherboard.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Have you tired plugging the old monitor back in with the new or old motherboard? ...power supply?

 

Does either board have a on board graphics card you could plug into to see if it boots?

[mskin]

so new motherboard/processor shows up today. ecstatic as you can imagine. put it together and BLAMO!!! same freaking thing. Mb has on boards graphic so i took my card out. same. possibly RAM? thats the only thing consistent. will try new ram tomorrow.

 

beep is long short short long short. AMI bios. long short short may indicate memory. hopefully it is. otherwise i am just stumped.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Not positive, meaning I have never tried it, but I would venture to guess that you should at least be able to post a bios screen with no RAM present at all.

[mskin]

i thought that too, which is why i neglected ram as the culprit. although, recently i had a machine that wouldn't post, and for some reason i decided to reseat the ram and it booted. as of now, its my only option left as everything is new...

[mskin]

embarrassing, but problem solved - but new issues arise.

 

excluding everything but the case (my ram was good - after testing it on neighbors machine) - i placed my motherboard on the kitchen table, attached the power supply, some ram and a video card to it. i jumped the "power on" pins with a flat head screw driver and voila!!! power on. upon close inspection of the case, the power button was stuck down. i cleaned it, released it and everything works fine.

 

so, one power supply, two motherboards and a new cpu later here i am.

 

i have a new AMD 1055T and Asus M4A785-M MB. i bought the Asus board because it supported my RAM and i wanted to re-use my ram. Upon Windows XP installation, im getting a blue screen error -

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL 0X0000000A (0x00000010,0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0x80523e78).

nothing is attached to the machine, i figured i'd use the on board VGA during install and attach everything else later. the only thing is my ram which is Crucial DDR2 800 (two 1 gig chips). This ram should be compatible with the motherboard as the manual says so. Any ideas on this one? im thinking either the processor doesn't like the ram, or windows xp doesn't like the processor? not quite sure whats going on here.

[mskin]

done. bought windows 7. no more woes. i actually like this OS so far. installed so much faster than xp, easier to set up. oh well. thanks for the help crazy.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Yeah, I was skeptical of Windows 7 after having bought a machine with Vista only to roll it back to XP because of OS performance. But once I took the plunge into 7, I can't imagine going back. The interface is a great deal more fluid, and more efficient. Which makes me happy.

 

I still turn off all Aero Glass stuff because of the graphics power needed to run that stuff, but overall I give it a thumbs up.