Dell lights come on solid but nothing after

Got a Dell Dimension 4600. Turned it on today and got power, fan...but nothing on the monitor. Both green lights on the front cover come on solid and stay solid. Lights on my other Dell which is working fine don't work that way. The left light stays solid, but the right light flickers and goes off when it is working. Something seems stuck. I've tried different monitors, nothing. Tried taking out the video card and using the default, nothing. Removed and reinstalled all the cards, nothing. Lights stay solid all the time. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

The right light is hard drive activity. Try unplugging the hard drive and see if you get anything on the screen.

 

Try unplugging the HDD

 

Progress! I think... Unplugged the HDs and removed the video card again, using the Dell VGA recepticle. I got video...but it won't boot up.

I get a bunch of info then:

Diskette drive 0 seek failure

Strike F1 to retry boot (I get 2 beeps) or F2 for Setup Utility, goes there fine but how does that help?

Tried starting in Safe Mode (holding F8 on and off). Not happening.

Please sirs, can I have some more? Thanks so far.

 

A little further info...I removed and reinstalled the battery in my attempts to get SOMETHING on my screen. Maybe not a good thing?

 

What do you get with the video card installed and the Hard drive not connected?

****Forget about F8 for now because it is only a Windows command that won't be useful for your problem****

 

Unbelievable...a little beginner's luck. I went thru the Setup thing and noticed it didn't think there were any hard drives and it was looking for a floppy. I set the hard drives for Auto and I guess it found them. I see my stuff!!

Network doesn't see me but I'll start on that tomorrow. Thanks for your efforts. I fear I'll be back before long. G'Night.

 

Ram ??

Okay I'm back. Sorry. Noticed my Dell is only recognizing 1 Meg of RAM. I've got 2 512K chips and 2 256K chips installed. I can't say if it has ever recognized all of them. From left to right as far as installation they go 512, 256, 512, 256. Believe that's according to instructions I read and I'm sure they're all seated right. I have taken them out and reinstalled them recently, is there a way to make the computer recheck? Or maybe a card or slot is bad? Is there a way to tell?

Thanks!!

 

Is Windows running? SIW will tell you what memory is being seen in which slots.

 

Wow...what a cool tool. I'd recommend this SIW to everyone!!

Turns out the sticks that say they are 512MB are being recognized as 256MB. They say something like (2 X 256MB) on them...and when they're the only two sticks installed I still get 1GB total. So I guess they're only 512MB when they're the only ones installed. Make sense? Not to me...

 

I would say to take out and reseat everything and try again. Still not work.... Unplug the power cord, hold the power-on button for 20 seconds then plug it back in and try again. Doing the clears the Nvram. Sounds funny but it may work.