pc shuts down as soon as i turn it on

[andyroo89]

hello well i got some pc's from my sister's friends dad and ihave one that im working on and when it starts up there's a cyclinder pic next to a light and that will turn on red and i noticed when looking in the pc case there's a light on next to the memory stick (RAM) and it's green so i dont know if thats a bad thing or not then i have to wait like 5 min. to try it again.

thx in advanced and i read some of elpatrops psot on rebooting problems jsut need a little more help

 

[King X13]

the green light on the mobo is fine, that just means there is power to the mobo.

how far into the boot are you before it reboots ? do you get the windows logo, or does it fail at the POST(power on self test)?

whats the system specs?

 

[LA1]

The green light next to the cylinder is your HD activity light and i assume the other is "power on"

so more details , like make of PC, just exactly what it does, do you see anything on the monitor.....etc?

youmay want to check the bios settings to see if the HD is being detected, usually press F1 ,F2 or delete at boot.

you may want to run memtest86
DL from here
http://kbserver.netgear.com/products/DG834GT.asp
the prog will make a bootable floppy. Put the floppy in the drive, reboot , go to the bios, set the bios to boot from floppy, exit and save bios, the pc will restart and boot from the floppy.

 

[andyroo89]

well i cleaned the fan and the grill it was on and ran little bit longer and for soem reason when i had my moniter on it said no signal detected

 

[LA1]

thats no good if the monitor is not getting a display, has it ever since you had the pc ?

 

[Stevo808]

Could be PSU or Video card.

 

[andyroo89]

im thinkin its the video card but i dont want to take out my video card and mess it up when trying to use it on the other pc

my friend said it could be the PSU.

 

[LA1]

Usually in cases like this about 70 - 90 % are a bad mainboard. Look and see if the caps on the mainboard are puffed out or leaking electrolyte.

If the there is an AGP slot and there is also an imbeded vidoe controller or a pci video card, the bios could be set to the AGP card AND the pci vid or embeded vis is bad. I have only seen that happen once.

could also be bad ram. with the power off, remove the ram, plug the pc back in and turn on. If the mainboard / processor is good you will hear beeps, no beeps, yup toast.

 

[WorldIndustries]

Some specs would help. And that cylinder with the light is the "hard drive loading" light.