Computer wont boot

Howdy all!

Well, tonight my computer threw me a curve. We came home from a weekend away tonight and I found my desktop behaving badly.

It is an AMD Athlon 800 (or 850 I forget) with 512mb of ram. I did not try rebooting when we came home. I did leave the puter on like I always do and let the screen saver take over. But when we came home I found the puter trying to reboot but never doing so.

It was hung up like it was restarted, but it would not do anything but turn the monitor on, then off and restart. It just was hung in limbo like that. When the monitor came on it would show the first energy star screen for a second then shut the monitor off.

I thought maybe the HD crashed. So, I swapped the hard drive with one from an old (uber slow) computer and the same thing occurred.

So, then I put the heard drive from my main computer into the old one and the energy star screen would come up, run the memory test and the drive/slave test and sit there like that.

They both wouldn't run, though the old puter worked with it's original hard drive.

So, I am on the work laptop now while I try and figure this all out.

I am afeared this means a new puter, but since the main one is a 2000 or 2001 I can't argue it is not time to upgrade.

This bitch of it is I will have to re setup email and will loose some things stored on the old hard drive. And no I am not paying shop time to recover nonsense off the old mains drive.

Anyway, I guess I am asking if anyone here has an answer or a direction to point me in?

Could the motherboard and hard drive puke at once? Could this all be due to the little wafer battery being possibly dead?

 

I cannot be sure of your problem but it does sound like a mother board problem or processor if the hard drive of your old PC worked fine in your old but not the one that restarts.

You could try shutting it down leaveing the power cable out for a minute or so and try again. Or it could also possibly be the ROM battery so you could try takeing that out and re-inserting it.

If you are still on 2000 I would upgrade if you have the funds to do so and to get the things off your hard drive to set it as slave on the newly purchased PC.
I wouldn't take my word for it just yet but that is what i would do. I would wait for somebody with more knowledge to either back me up or help you further, but was all just a few suggestions

 

On a whim, I went to the local computer shop and they had an interesting thought. They though it might be the operating system that had been corrupted. Due, she said, to my leaving the computer on standby (screensaver) and not shutting it off.

I found that interestig as I have almost never shut it down in the whole 9 years I have owned it. I reboot frequently, but just let the sytem idle when not in use. In fact I have done this with every computer I have ever owned and still have the first and it still works!

Is there merit to this, or did they just want to sell me a new puter?

 

hmmm I'm not sure, you could try formatting and finding out to see if it does keep resetting? is it possible to get onto the BIOS to do so?

you could also put the 2000 hard drive in an old machine if you got it layin around to see if it boots, then that would cancel out the Motherboard issue.

 

Thanks for the reply.

I did take the drive and try it inan old machine and I took the drive from the old machine and tried it in my main computer.

The newer computer with the old drive did the same thing, just kept trying to restart and turned the monitor off and on.

The old computer with the newer drive started up and stayed on the energy star page - you know the first page with the energy star logo and the drive info and memory test. I have not tried but I think I can access the bios or boot from a disk with this one. Time will tell. If this is the case, I can at least recover the information I want. Like I said, there is nothing on the drive that would kill me if I didn't have it...you know?

I am pricing out a new tower as this is a 9 year old computer and is quite slow compared to everything that is out right now.

I'd rather spend the money into getting a new system than repairing an old one.

But here is the lesson! I WILL backup my desired files REGULARLY so when a computer crashes again, I will at least have week old backups in the worst case scenario! I am also installing e mail access on more than one computer and figuring out how to access e mail remotely so I can at least keep up with e mail. Lessons hard learned. I may also keep a slave drive with the OS and all as a backup...gotta figure that part out, but first is a new system.

 

Sounds like you have a good plan on the go but if you want to get the files off your main computer (assuming your old computer is working still) just whack your main Hard Drive in your old pc as a slave, boot up and then go into My Computer and your main hard drive as well as your old one shall be shown.
You can access your main HardDrives files from there and copy them onto an external HardDrive or your old HardDrive if you have space?
I did that with my brothers old PC because he never used it, turns out i accidently deleted some of his stories that he had written in his spare for more space :-D oops rolleyes to be fair he never used it and i got it from out of the box!

I hope what i have suggested has been accurate and helpful towards your needs.