Need help diagnosing system that will not boot

My system stopped booting last week. It had been acting a little flakey for a few months now, with slow boot ups and intermittent locking up causing me to hard boot the system. But this last hard boot resulted in an endless booting cycle, where it would never boot to the O/S. I turned the system off and reseated my memory, then turned it on and now I won't even get a post boot, no beeps, no nothing.

My first inkling is the motherboard is shot, and I've been bidding on a used one on eBay. But I'm wondering if maybe the CPU took a hit. Is there anyway to tell whether the mobo or CPU is the problem?? I would hate to buy another mobo only to find it's the CPU.

Thanks in advance........

 

So, it attempts to boot, but fails. Have you tried safe mode? My guess it could be the HDD failing.

 

If it was the hdd I would still get a post boot.

 

Well, problem solved!

Turned out to be a bad stick of memory! A friend at work suggested I try removing the memory. Removing both sticks brought on the familiar beeps when I powered on the pc, then putting them back in I had my original problem. Then removing one of them, got me the post boot. Just so happens when I built the system 6 yrs ago, I bought extra matching memory, which I still had brand new in the package. I slapped those suckers in and it booted normally!!

Hopefully this will help someone else down the road.

 

Nice! Thanks for the update!