Trouble booting/rebooting

My computer didn't boot up yesterday morning. Turned on the power, the on button glowed, but the hard drive light didn't go on and the monitor remained black from the start. After a while, forced shutdown, waited, rebooted, same thing. No error messages, nothing on the screen of any kind.

I used recovery disks to reinstall XP, computer seemed to work fine after that, spent the day downloading updates to get to SvcPack3. This morning continued to install updates, then after one reboot I got the black screen again--hard drive light didn't come on at all. Forced shutdown, rebooted, reboot was successful. So the problem, whatever it is, is intermittent.

It's five years old, an HP Pavilion w/WinXP Media Cntr Ver2002, SvcPack 3, AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual Core Processor 4200+, 2.20 GHz, 1.93 GB of RAM.

I ran CHKDSK, it said it cleaned up minor inconsistencies on the drive, cleaned up unused index entries, and discovered free space marked as allocated in the MFT bitmap. Found 0 bad sectors.

Any advice you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

 

As no bad sectors were reported by the error-checker, it probably isn't a failing drive, but I would test it just to be sure, with the drive manufacturer's diagnostic software. As it's the system drive (ie it's got Windows installed on it) you should test it with the DOS version of the diagnostic software. The links are here: http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

The download gives you an 'ISO' file from which you can make a CD using IMGBurn from here: http://filehippo.com/download_imgburn/

Boot your PC from that CD to test the drive using the "Long" or "Extended" test option if available.

 

My guess: marginal power supply that is too weak now.
Try a new, more wattage power supply.

 

Hi,

Pip22 and plodr gave the two most likely fixes. The power supply is definitely suspect.

Although it doesn't quite fit with being unable to boot after a restart required by an update, I would suggest replacing the CMOS battery since it is an easy thing to try and at 5 years old, the battery is one more thing to rule out. I say it doesn't quite fit because you have constant power to the machine during such a restart so the battery shouldn't come into play but I have seen bad CMOS batteries cause a lot of strange problems.