Computer boot problems

[shaggy420]

I am having a very strange problem. So I recently bought a USB 2.0 PCI expansion card for my computer and decided to install it tonight. When I went to turn my computer back on, it started to power on, but turned off after about 2 seconds and the power light blinked repeatedly until I unplugged the PC altogether for a minute or two. First I removed the USB card and tried to power on again with no luck and the same problem. So after trying a few more times, I decided to clean out the insides of the PC to get rid of some dust and such, still no luck. So then I took out my hard drive and put it in a spare PC as a slave drive, and the spare PC could see the hard drive and access the files on it.

So I took my main system and broke it down to bare bones - one chip of memory, keyboard, video card, and a spare hard drive I had laying around. PC booted fine like this. So I took my main hard drive out of the spare and swapped it back into the main PC as the only master drive, and it came back to the original problem - wouldn't boot. I unplugged the power from the drive, and the PC booted to the BIOS and POST was fine. Plug power back into the drive and wouldnt boot. Swapped IDE cables, put it on secondary, slave, cable select, none of which boots. As soon as my original hard drive is powered and connected, the PC wont boot.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

In the problem PC, I have
-LEAD POWER 550 Watt ATX power supply
-ASUS A7V133 motherboard
-NVIDIA Geforce 4 MX 4000 Vid Card
-1 stick 256 MB SDRAM (after other two sticks were removed)
-Athlon 1.2 Ghz processor
-Western Digital WD1200 120 GB hard drive 5400 rpm

Please help!

 

[cdkiller]

well clearly the problem is your original hard drive. i was building a system about a year ago and each time i put in the sata hdd it did not boot. so i tried all sorts of useless things until i replaced the hdd with another sata and it worked.

whether its sata or ide hard drives i think the answer is the same. what you could do is try the hard drive in another pc or by a friend and if you blow up that pc too (just kidding)... if you get the same problem then its definitely the hard drive needs to be replaced.

 

[SYL\X/3K]

As cdkiller said put the original hd into a different system and boot it as a slave, if it boots download one of these diagnostic tools to try fixing the hd:

Western Digital Data Lifeguard 5.04f
Western Digital DLG for Windows 1.07.01

 

[bmxfreakrider]

and if the hdd cant be salvaged, get a new one, maybe a se16 320gb one. hey, and just a note the newer mx4000's have some voltage regulating problems, so if you experience weird display problems, rma the card, but make sure that you have a fan cooler(or buy a new one) cause when i sent mine in, i bought it from walmart, and it had a fan, got it from 3dfuzion, and it had a giant hs(which gets extremely hot, cause the cards are natively oced)

 

[shaggy420]

Yea one of the first things i did was put the HD in a spare PC as a slave drive and it worked fine, I could access my files and all.

 

[shaggy420]

Im going to try those diagnostics on the drive and see if anything turns up. I also tried switiching out the video card with a really old crappy one that shouldnt draw much power and it still wouldnt boot.

 

[shaggy420]

I think I may have found the problem...

I switched out my power supply with a 200W one and booted fine.

Thanks for all your help!