Any suggestions, please?

[Jordon Bedwell]

  On 9/9/2010 11:27 AM, Tim Henderson wrote:
> On 09/09/10 10:02, Basil Chupin wrote:
>> This morning (many hours ago now) I booted up my system, had some
>> upgrades to 10.04.1 done (almost all to do with Firefox) and then,
>> suddenly the monitor screen went black, went into "sleep" mode - and
>> there were no responses from the keyboard or the mouse.
>>
>> Rebooting achieved nothing.
>>
>> While all the fans in the system (7 of them, including the CPU fan) plus
>> the HDs were working/spinning, the system would not boot, and there were
>> no beep(s) from the mobo to indicate what was wrong.
>>
>> My conclusion was that some part of the mobo was dead.
>>
>> But what?
>>
>> Could anyone please offer suggestions as to what I could check to see
>> which part of the mobo has 'died'?
>>
>> (( have transferred my main components to another chassis/mobo to keep
>> going, which I am now doing, but the downgrade from 3200+ Athlon XP with
>> 1.5GB of RAM to a 1200+ XP with 500MB of RAM is just kinda difficult to
>> adjust to :-) - not impossible, mind you, but somewhat disorientating.
>> [For the first time I see that my Swap file is being used! :-) .]
>>
>> (Actually, without prejudice, I see no real degradation of performance
>> by Ubuntu 10.04.1 provided that I only have one or two main applications
>> running.)
>>
>> (Oh, I am running, and have run, a 32-bit system with ATA IDE drives - a
>> system which I built myself.
>>
>> Any ideas, folks?
>>
>> BC
>>
> Does the monitor show anything during boot?  If not I think the monitor
> died.
>
> Otherwise first thing try booting to a live cd, mount your HDD, back up
> your files.  Then try troubleshooting from the live cd, if that doesnt
> work then reinstall.
>
> If nothing, then your Mobo or other component is fried...follow other
> suggestions for testing components.
>
> Tim H.
>

It would be easy to tell if a monitor broke, I'm pretty sure the tell 
all LED would give a pretty big hint at failure.  It could have been a 
simple GPU failure. Even a PSU failure which is the first place you 
should be ultimately checking would give a big hint.  Even if the PSU 
turns on that doesn't mean it hasn't failed.  A failed PSU can have the 
power to boot up half the system.  You can take it to your local 
computer shop or radio shack and they can do a wattage and voltage test 
on it to see if it's failed, or you can run out to the hardware store or 
radio shack again and pick up a cheapo $9 tester and see for yourself.

If the memory failed, it would give a tell all sign as well, the 
computer would boot, unless all banks and all memory went bad, that's 
why your mother board tests it's memory, to see if a bank or stick has 
failed so it can either tell your (or disable it depending on the type 
of mobo), hint hint that's been in mobos for years now, especially in 
commercial workstations and servers.  If the bus failed, it would act 
the same way, but again, the first step should always be the PSU since 
it takes the most strain in the entire system.