Lockup following POST

Please forgive me if this is a re-hash of a problem you guys have already dealt with. I've read almost every post in the Hardware section of this forum, but haven't come across this specific problem. If it's already been solved, I'd appreciate it if someone would post a link to the correct thread.

I have a 2003 Dell Dimension 2400, running WinXP Pro, SP3, or at least it was yesterday. Everything is stock except for the RAM, which I increased to 2 GB.

Today, when I pressed the power button to turn on the computer, the power light glowed steadily and the CD drive light blinked rapidly, as usual. Instead of blinking on, then off, the floppy drive light glowed steadily, even though there was no disk in it. The Dell splash screen displayed normally, and the white progress bar advanced from left to right. At that point, the monitor screen turned solid black, with nothing displayed except for a blinking cursor in the upper-left corner.

The disk-activity light was completely dark, and the only sound from the case were the fans running.

After using the power button to turn off the machine, then again trying to boot it, I gave up and visited Dell Chat on another computer here in my office. The technician spent nearly two hours walking me through various fixes, but none of them had any effect in terms of making the computer boot into Windows.

We could access the BIOS setup screen by pressing F2, and the Boot Device Menu by pressing F12. When I selected any of the options in the Boot Menu and pressed the Enter key, the thing would freeze there, and nothing other than the blinking cursor could be seen.

I've disconnected everything from the computer except the monitor, the mouse, and the keyboard. I've also disconnected the two DVD/CD drives, and replaced the floppy drive with a known-good one from another computer. Nothing made a bit of difference.

Dell has given up on the computer, and I think that may be the best route. However, if anyone here can think of a solution to this problem, I'd be very grateful to read it.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

Welcome to MajorGeeks.com

Read almost every post in the Hardware forum? WOW! That's over 124,000 posts!!!

Seriously though, it would be helpful if you would outline exactly what the Dell tech and you have tried so we don't spend ages instructing you to do things you already have

 

my first guss would be a bad power supply replace psu with know good one and see if that helps

 

I should have said that I've read every post in the Hardware section that is related to similar problems. Even though there are only 19 pages in this section, I would make no claim to having read each and every post. Forgive my error. :-o

The Dell technician suggested many possible fixes during the two hour session, such as disconnecting the DVD/CD drives one at a time, then attempting the boot process. He had me disconnect the power cable, press and hold the power button to drain any residual current, then after a two-minute wait, reconnect the cable and try again.

I also removed the motherboard battery, then waited two minutes before re-installing it, in order to restore the original BIOS. After that, we spent several fruitless minutes trying each option in the Boot Device Menu. There are seven options there, and the only two that yielded any results were the one to perform IDE diagnostics and to enter System Setup. Both of those options functioned as expected; however, the other five did nothing other than lock-up everything.

I also disconnected the Maxtor drive in the Dimension 2400, then replaced it with a Western Digital drive from another of my Dells. No joy there, either.

At the end of it all, the computer was as before: the power light would glow bright green, the floppy drive would do the same, and the monitor displayed nothing but a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper-left corner.

I suppose it's entirely possible the power supply is at the root of the problem, but buying another on the chance it may work is not within my budget right now, and probably not a justifiable expense for a machine that's five years old. I had made a full disk image just three days before the problem occurred, using Terabyte Unlimited's "Image for DOS," and I may just buy a refurbished computer from Dell Auction and install the image on it. Then I can fight with Microsoft when the operating systems screams about being a pirated edition.

Thanks for the responses, guys.

 

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to help me resolve this issue. I hope the suggestions that have been posted here, along with what I did to at last get the computer to boot into Windows will be of use to anyone else who may experience a similar problem.

The solution was so simple that I'm embarrassed to write about it, but in the interest of helping someone else, I'm going to anyway.

When the Dell Dimension 2400 was my primary computer, it was directly connected to the Internet by an Ethernet cable running from the cable modem to the computer. Over a year ago, the onboard Ethernet jack failed, and I could no longer get on the Web, so I installed a Trendnet Fast Ethernet PCI Adapter.

When my new computer was delivered two weeks ago, I created a network based on a Linksys wireless router, with a direct Ethernet connection to the new machine. I hooked up a Belkin antenna to the old computer, and was then able to have both machines on the Internet at the same time.

That setup worked flawlessly until a few days ago, when the boot problem described above popped up. As I mentioned, nothing I did or that the Dell technician suggested made any difference whatsoever: the blasted machine refused to advance beyond the POST.

Friday morning I was looking at the open case of the computer, and had the bright idea to remove all the PCI cards to see if that would have any effect. So, out came the Creative Labs sound card, the Ethernet card, and a modem card that hadn't been used at all. As soon as I'd done that, I pressed the power button once again, and the boot process succeeded!

Today, I reinstalled the sound card, and tested the boot process several times. It worked in every instance. The old modem card then was replaced, and again the computer worked as expected. I'm not about to press my luck by installing the Ethernet card again, so I can't say definitely that it was the problem, but my guess is that it was.

Anyway, the problem is solved, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it won't happen again.

Thanks again to those who have replied to my original post.

 

id place good money on the Creative Labs sound card being @ fault here I used to need todo the same thing