I've got a little unusual problem that I've been trying to figure out all day.
I rarely turn off my pc, or even reboot it. For no particular reason I decided to turn off my PC this morning and about one hour later I came back to turn it on, only that it now refuses to turn on.
The first thing I was able to notice was an usual whistling noise which turned out to be coming from my hard drive. After unplugging my hard drive, the PC turned on fine and worked like a cham (of course it didn't load up XP since there was nothing to load)
Since I have two PCs in the house I tried plugging the hard drive into my other PC and wouldn't ya know it, it worked fine. I even swapped the power source and my computer worked normally, however the power source on my second pc isn't the greatest and my PC started turning off every 30 mins or so (I'm guessing it was over heating, the PSU was really hot)
Even stranger, since I had the PSU that was causing the problems in my second PC I decided to plug in the HDD to see if the PSU was the problem and the hard drive worked. Apon changing PSU's back to my main PC the hard drive was giving the error I started out with.
I'll try being a little more specific with the problem. The computer never starts, it doesn't even get to the bios, it just constantly reboots. Once I power up the PC my HD spins for less then a second, then stops (also makes an odd whistling noise which it normally doesn't make), my CDrom also spins for a split second but then stops. And it just goes into an infinte loop of this little thing.
Any suggestions? From what I can tell the problem is either from the PSU or HDD, but I really don't want to go out and waste $30-50 on a new PSU, or a hundred or two on a new HDD unless I know it's the root of the problem. Right now I'm completely stumped.
Thanks
Alex
I rarely turn off my pc, or even reboot it. For no particular reason I decided to turn off my PC this morning and about one hour later I came back to turn it on, only that it now refuses to turn on.
The first thing I was able to notice was an usual whistling noise which turned out to be coming from my hard drive. After unplugging my hard drive, the PC turned on fine and worked like a cham (of course it didn't load up XP since there was nothing to load)
Since I have two PCs in the house I tried plugging the hard drive into my other PC and wouldn't ya know it, it worked fine. I even swapped the power source and my computer worked normally, however the power source on my second pc isn't the greatest and my PC started turning off every 30 mins or so (I'm guessing it was over heating, the PSU was really hot)
Even stranger, since I had the PSU that was causing the problems in my second PC I decided to plug in the HDD to see if the PSU was the problem and the hard drive worked. Apon changing PSU's back to my main PC the hard drive was giving the error I started out with.
I'll try being a little more specific with the problem. The computer never starts, it doesn't even get to the bios, it just constantly reboots. Once I power up the PC my HD spins for less then a second, then stops (also makes an odd whistling noise which it normally doesn't make), my CDrom also spins for a split second but then stops. And it just goes into an infinte loop of this little thing.
I'll just quickly summarize what the problems are
- PC never starts up, HDD makes an unusual ticking noise, CDROM starts to spon but stops after a second, goes into a loop of this.
- Tried HDD under a different PSU and it works perfectly, starts up, with no problems
- With a different HDD my PC will start up just fine with no problems at all.
- Swapped PSU to another computer and the PC works fine with no problems. The HDD also works fine under this PSU (but it's in a different PC)
- Switched around RAM chips several times and result remains the same
Any suggestions? From what I can tell the problem is either from the PSU or HDD, but I really don't want to go out and waste $30-50 on a new PSU, or a hundred or two on a new HDD unless I know it's the root of the problem. Right now I'm completely stumped.
Thanks
Alex