Hi guys and girls.
Having a spot of bother with my system, couldn't have happened at a worse just as I've just been made redundant and desperately need to get my PC sorted (at as little cost as possible) to sent out job applications/CV's etc.
Okay, here's what has been happening -
Originally, I had been having trouble with the hard drive as it had starting failing to boot up (got to the windows XP screen with the rolling load bar, finished with that screen, switched off the monitor and then computer would freeze. Could only ever boot up in safe mode.)
Was convinced that it was the drive and not the graphics card as occasionally it would boot up and never found any problems with the graphics processing once it did boot up. So I got to the point where I decided to re-install windows out of a misguided notion that this might help, and it got to a certain point on the hard drive where it just stopped dead, turned off the monitor and then froze!!
Turned computer off and on and it resumed installing again, and same happened again. After switching off about five or six times, PC died almost completely.

Now when I switch on, the fans kick fully into life, and never die down. The lights on both my DVD drives flicker for a couple of seconds, there doesn't seem to be any life to the floppy drive, and I've checked the power supply for voltage on every tap and it seems fine, all correct voltages are present to both the drives and the motherboard, but nothing seems to be happening with regards to processing or anything else except the fans.
I'm assuming that motherboard/processor (either/or/both) have died, but my knowledge is fairly limited. I'm pretty reasonable with electronics, but completely ignorant when it comes to PC's.
I've already bought a new Seagate S-ATA drive to replace the Maxtor which I'm still convinced had had it's day.
Is there anywhere else I should be looking?
My next step, is to remove modem, graphics card, and memory and try and switch on in between every step, to rule out any internal shorts in these from causing the board malfunction (or am I just wasting my time here?)

Any help or ideas here would be much appreciated as I really don't know what I'm doing, and being out of work really need to spend as little as I can sorting it out.

Thanks for reading,
Daymz

Do you get any beeping besides post single beep?

No beeps at all. No life to anything except fans, and a momentary couple of seconds from the dvd drives.

I would start testing all your hardware,taking it out one peice at a time.First move a stick of RAM then reboot and keep going till you have tested each item of hardware.As for hard drive failure can you not even get post screen up?To see if hard drive is listed?If it was say HDD failure you proberly but not always get black screen with operating system not found.

My CD/DVD drives flicker for a few seconds when I first turn pc on they are fine.

Its always worth testing hardware if you want to try and save pc.

Nope no post screen, no monitor, no nothing, except for fans. And normally when it was working they'd jump fully into life and then almost immediately come right down in speed. Especially the processor fan which didn't actually run that often. Now I switch on, with no beep (which of course it used to do - I guess I should have mentioned this in the first post), and the fans just run flat out. I only have one memory card as well, but we'll see what happens when I attempt to remove everything one at a time.
Might be worth mentioning that I didn't have a GART driver for the graphics card till about two weeks before the failure as well. At first I thought this might have been the booting up problem till I narrowed it down to the hard drive.
Turns out I was very wrong.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Thanks for reading,
Daymz

Ok,could you also flash the BIOS remove battery for one minute then replace and reboot.There maybe a bad configuration in the BIOS setup.

An incorrect BIOS configuration can cause various issues such as:

• failure to boot
• no video
• system hangs
• poor performance
• power management problems