I'm not sure which board to put this in, so I'll drop it here. If a mod needs to move it, that's ok with me.

I have this new PC (my friend picked it up at a pawn shop for free). It's a 1.1ghz Celeron Web-Lan personal computer. It was missing some parts, like memory, a floppy drive cable and a hard drive. So I went down to my favorite computer junk store, and got memory and floppy cable and a hard drive. The drive was broken, so I got it exchanged and at the same time, purchased a PCI ethernet card.

When I got home, I plugged all the parts in and booted. For some reason, the pc was booting from a command.com file left on the hard drive. So I checked the floppy drive settings in the BIOS setup window. Sure enough it was set as the primary boot device! So I checked the floppy drive and it's power cable and come out, so I plugged it in. I can't remember if I remembered to turn the computer off though. :shocked:

Anyway. I'm pretty sure I turned it off, then turned it on once the floppy was connected. Nothing. Nothing at all. The power button was if it wasn't even there...

So I unplugged the power and reset button/leds from the motherboard, and plugged them back in. Tried again. Nothing.

Switched out my memory. Tried again. Nothing.

Turned the power supply off then on. Tried again. Nothing.

Meddled with a jumper. (I assumed it was the cmos jumper.) Tried again. Nothing.

Pulled out the cmos battery and put it back in. Tried again. Nothing.

Let it sit for 20 - 30 minutes. Prayed to god. Tried again. Nothing.

Let it sit for several hours. Tried again. Nothing.

Checked all the cables. Tried again. Nothing.



Help?! Please!

Hi Jones,

Welcome to PCHF. You are correct, lol, this is not the correct forum for this post. You want the PC Hardware forum. That's OK, I'll be happy to move your post.

LGW

OK, now that we have you in the right forum, I want you to know that we have a wonderful team of techs on this site with a broad range of computer knowledge. I am sure that we can help you figure this out.

It certainly sounds as if you know your way around a computer, good job troubleshooting. Have you tried putting everything back the way it was originally, to see if the PC responds?

Hardware is not my area of expertise, so I will ask some preliminary questions that may be of help to our hardware gurus.

Can you please post the stats of all of components for your PC?

Are you getting any beeps or any indication whatsoever that the PC is getting power?

When the computer was booting from the command on the HD, did it boot all the way to a command prompt, or OS depending on what state of install you are currently in?

Look forward to your reply,

TTFN

LGW

Thanks for putting this post where it belongs, and your reply.

I'm afraid I don't actually know very much about this pc.

It's a 1.1 Ghz Celeron, with 96mb of ram (3 sticks of 32mb). It's got a 4.3GB Western Digital hard drive and the original floppy drive and "Life's good" 52x cd drive.

The power supply is a "Power Man" 250 watt (that's awfully low, ain't it) psu. The new PCI card is an "Intel PRO 10/100 PCI Ethernet card", and the video card is a ATI Rage Pro, which is 8mb, I believe.

When I say "not booting", I mean "not booting". Like not doing anything. No beeps, no lights no nothing. I removed the front face plate, in case the button front plastic part was broken, but it's all ok too. When it did boot off the drive, it went to the Windows 98 command prompt, the only file on the drive was command.com.

Update:

I did as you suggested and took out all the stuff I added, all the RAM the drive and the PCI ethernet card. Guess what? It booted! As soon as I plugged it back into the wall socket, the computer fans turned on and it started beeping loudly. (probably cuz of the lack of ram)

The power button didn't work to turn it off, so I just pressed the power supply switch to off, and it turned off.

Now I'll try putting the ram back in and seeing if it boots.

Thanks for your help!

Update:

New problem.

I've isolated the bad component. The floppy drive.

As long as the floppy drive is connected, neither the power button nor PSU switch can turn the computer on.

The new problem is, why??

I do need the floppy drive, btw. Sadly. :sad:

[EDIT]:

Update:

I've made (a little) progress with the floppy drive. I guess I didn't turn the computer off when I plugged it in and burned somehting out. However, my floppy connector cable had two (non motherboard) ends on it, so I tried the one that wasn't plugged. Nothing. Then I turned that same end upside down and plugged. This time the floppy drive light came on and it made that whining sound that floppy drives make, but the DOS startup screen still says "Floppy disk(s) fail (40)".

Hmm. I hope it's just the drive, and not the actual Motherboard.

Any opinions on this?

Ok, well I pulled the floppy drive out, shook it and slid it back in. This time connecting it to the original cable in/out port thing (dictionary please!).

And... it works fine! Yay!

:hello2: Good Job Jonesy,

Way to tackle that computer! LOL

Just to check in, do you still need any help with this from the hardware gurus?

LGW