PC won't boot

A friend of mine brought his once working PC over for not booting. He has almost the same setup as me. Gigabyte P55-UDR3R with a i-5 750 4GB ram. When I say "won't boot" I mean not even to BIOS. No beeps from the Motherboard no fans running on the GPU. It appeared to be a PSU. All the LED's on his MB are lit though. I took my HTPC off the rack and plugged all my power wires from my PSU into his drives/motherboard. I didn't take the PSU out of my case since it would have been too much work with my cases configuration. Well now it powers on, but all you hear are several rapid beeps (maybe like 7-9) then a pause then repeat.

So nothing with his PSU & beeps and all the fans on GPU/CPU work with mine. The manual for the motherboard says that beeping is a "power issue". But i plugged all the wires back into my system and it powers up fine.

Was there something we were missing? I thought maybe the PSU (from my case) needed to be grounded so I attached a wire from it to his case with no help.

I seems obvious that his issue has to be PSU related, but I cannot figure out why it won't boot with mine.

Any suggestions?

 

Greetings, tjlmbklr.

The possibility exists that when the PSU crapped out, it took some other component(s) with it. The fact that your symptoms changed when you plugged in a known good PSU only proves that the PSU has been affected.

You might try disconnecting everything from the motherboard (hard drives, monitors, optical drives, plug-in boards, etc.) and troubleshoot from the ground up. Try the RAM dance (swap sticks, one stick at a time, etc.).

 

Before doing an autopsy on the board and components, try this:

• Keep a known good power supply connected to the board, drives, etc.
• Unplug the PC.
• Remove the coin-size BIOS battery from the motherboard.
• Wait about 2 minutes, reinstall the battery then try turning on the PC.

This will clear and reset the CMOS settings - if they were corrupted when the old PSU died, this may bring things back to life.

Good luck on solving the issue.

 

I agree. The PSU is definitely shot, and probably took something out with it. Ask your friend some questions to try to determine what might have caused the PSU to quit - did the case fall over; did it get wet; did he have a surge or blackout; was he/she poking around inside it with the power on; was there a recent upgrade; etc?

Is the computer beefy - might your PSU not push enough Watts required?

You can most definitely keep your PSU in your computer and connect the cords from there. There's no need for it to be grounded to the other case or anything like that.

As Caliban says, start eliminating hardware. Start with the fewest necessary things, and continue from there if you get some signs of life. The fewest components would be PSU, Mobo, CPU, 1 RAM module, and Monitor. This means remove any cards in AGP/PCI/etc slots, remove all but one RAM module
(and do Caliban's dance), disconnect hard drives, floppy drives and CD drives (remember where they plugged in though!), and don't worry about keyboards or mice yet either. Assuming *something* appears on the screen, you can turn the comp off, return a component, and try again.