Hardware?

[biggmc01]

Hope this is the right forum. Pentium 4 1.7 ghz, 394 mb ram, 80 gb hd, XP Home.

System suddenly will not boot, freezes during post(ram count) sometimes, sometimes makes it further and then just hangs. Tried to use xp disk to boot and it locked on me. Emergency Nav disk won't work. Tried most of what I know but to no avail.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

[kirbykirbykirby]

did you add any new hardware then the bios crashed on you? if you did take it out and reboot and see if it loads to windows? otherwise it might be bad ram.

[biggmc01]

No new hardware added at all.

[pentachris]

Get a can of compressed air or, better yet, an anti-static vaccuum and blow/suck out any dust that's accumulated in the case. Make sure the RAM hasn't come unseated. Just for grins & giggles, pull it out and reseat it to be sure; or, better yet, try another compatible stick of RAM if you have access to one. Check the motherboard for bad capacitors (http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=25482).

Post back with any progress made.

[biggmc01]

I'll try that later tonight when I get a chance and will post results tomorrow.

Thanks!

[biggmc01]

....cleaned out the case, swapped RAM from another system and checked the capacitors with a magnifying glass( all shiny clean and sealed). Still can't get the damn thing to even go into BIOS properly let alone boot. The first time it will let you into bios then freeze, second time it doesn't even get that far. The RAM that is in it works fine in a Win 2000 machine I have. But this system has all my bells and whistles( and my games) so to speak.

Any ideas anyone?

[pentachris]

Next thing to try would be a barebones boot. One stick of ram, cpu, video card - no drives, no peripherals (you should get a keyboard error). If that works, start hooking everything up one by one until the problem repeats itself - that will be your bad part.

If it doesn't work, you could try removing the motherboard and placing it on a non-conductive surface (like a piece of cardboard) and see if it'll boot. If so, there's a short, probably from the motherboard to the case.

[PrntRhd]

I would borrow a keyboard and try it too.