Help me solve this problem please

I turned my computer on this morning and everything on my monitor looked normal, going through the startup script as usual. Then, the screen went black (not standby, apparantly getting a black signal) and stayed like this for a few minutes. I did a ctrl-alt-delete and got a black screen again.

Next I did a force shutdown and restarted to see the monitor flashing "no signal", but what concerned me is the LED light that normally runs solid (showing the computer is on) was sort of thready and flashing quickly.

Diagnosis???

I first feared that one of the hard drives on the RAID setup was down, but when I disconnected them and connected another hard disk with an operating system installed (and used the jumper settings to make it the master drive), I got the same problem.

Next I thought video card, but the normal beeps associated with a bad video card were not there. Took the video card out to make sure, and no beeps when restarting. I am now fearing mother board failure. Thoughts??

Thanks in advance,

MisterW

If the motherboard is fried, is it possible to buy the same motherboard (Gigabyte 8IEXP 533Mhz FSB) and plug in the RAID 0 setup without losing the data on those drives? Is it possible it's the processor that's down and not the motherboard?

Thanks in advance,

MisterW

[Eratosthenes]

It sounds like the problem is not in your raid drives. I would leave them unplugged until you successfully boot from the other drive (it does have an operating system?).

To me, it sounds like a motherboard or power supply problem. When you power up you are getting no beeps, no drives spinning, just fan noise, right? I have had a power supply fail with exactly these symptoms. It is possible that your processor is fried, but I would look at the other possibilities first. Can you borrow a power supply? Make sure it is large enough to handle your system. If you can't boot with a known-good power supply, then I head off to get a replacement motherboard.

By the way, a competent repair shop has an instrument to test a power supply.

If you want to test hardware problems, I would start by removing all of the hardware. I am talking everything but the powersupply and processor. (You dont have to physically remove hard drives and cd roms, just unplug them completely.) I would disconnect and reconnect the power supply from the motherboard after unloading all the hardware. Make sure your Speaker is plugged into the motherboard so you get the beeps. If you turn it on with just these barebones and get the beep codes you will probably be allright. If you get the beep codes, start by putting in the RAM. Then move to the video card and then to the harddrive etc.

I recently had my dual processor system go out. I followed these steps of removing all hardware and determined one of my processor slots was bad on the motherboard.

Thanks for the advice... I will try stripping down the system and putting hardware on one by one, trying to get it to run with the other hard drive (I have an operating system installed on this one but use it as a slave drive). I'm pretty sure it is not a power supply issue since my power supply literally burned up last year and I replaced it with a new one. Everything seems to be getting power; hard drives are spinning and CD drives are fired up.

I tried turning it on again to figure out what was going on, and on two trials the startup script showed on my monitor and both times detected IDE devices [cd-rom and dvd-rom] but froze when it said "scanning IDE devices."

Thoughts??

Thanks again,

MisterW

Maybe a bent IDE pin in the the IDE drive or on the IDE slot on the motherboard.

I just realized the PC speaker is not connected. I am currently trying to figure out how to connect it (any advice?), and hopefully I'll get some sort of beeping that will indicate what is wrong.

If I were to get an identical motherboard and just plug everything in like it is now, would it work? Specifically, would the RAID 0 work without any data loss?

Thank you for your advice on this headache of a situation,

MisterW