HELP Computer Meltdown XP

Hey All

Here is the situation my brothers computer was working fine he was chatting on yahoo ( yeah i know ) and it locked up.. He tried to end task and the system hard locked ie no mouse movement. He Powered the system off then on again. Then after the XP splash screen goes away the system just dies.. Black screen, no HDD activity, nada. I ran repair from the XP disk, nothing, ran fixboot, fixmbr, got it too boot once then when we rebooted, same thing. Did a dirty xp install no luck, and now have totally reformatted the hdd and done a fresh install and the same thing is happening so its NOT software related. I ran WD Diag suite from a bootable CD and both hdd's passed extensive tests. Im at my wits end and getting major heat to get this fixed. Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated Here is the HW List Its a Home Built PC
Athlon XP1900
768 Meg
2- WD 80 gig HDD
64 Meg GeForce 4
3com NIC
Sound Blaster Live 5.1
Logitech Wireless Mouse, Keyboard and Webcam
HP 990C Printer.

PLEASE HELP
Marc
ctsboss@msn.com

Couple of simple tests:

Disconnect everything not directly needed to boot - CD-ROM, Network card, soundblaster, printer, webcam only have 1 HDD and 1 stick of RAM (try the other stick(s) on their own if that fails) and try again. Something could have died and may be taking the entire system down.

Try reseating all major components such as CPU, RAM & vid card. Check all connections.

You say you see the BIOS POST screen right? Does everything look normal there? Does it see all your components / RAM etc? Is the CPU at the right frequency? Do you overclock? if so try taking that back to standard settings.

GL!

S

//moved to hardware.

Yeah thats the next step I WAS hoping not to have to do that hoping it was software but it looks like im gonna have no choice now.

M

Maybe try booting from a known good hdd. That would help narrow it down a bit.

My initial guess is a bad hdd. For what its worth, these do go bad - my grandfather bought a brand new Sony Vaio ($2000+), and it shipped w/ a bad hdd.

Initially I thought bad HDD too. But I have Tech Toolz CD with all the Manufacturer HDD testing programs on it. I tested both hdd's including surface scans and they both passed no errors. So im kinda thinking to rule out the hdd's

M

If you've rebuilt Windows and it's still doing it then you've ruled out software yourself unless you didn't format when you rebuilt windows.

When a client of mine got Sasser and it screwed his XP build completely, sticking Windows back over the top didnt resolve it. I had to completely reformat to get it back as it seemed to keep some settings.

S

I am going through the same thing after building a PC and have managed to identify my problem as a faulty Power Supply Unit (it should arrive today or in the morning - will keep you posted).

In your case its a faulty Power Supply Unit OR Graphics card OR Ram. See if you can swap any of these (if you have 2 Ram sticks have one running at a time). Buy a PSU as you may need a spare in future. Then If you still have no luck buy a new HD cos you can run two of these if it aint faulty.

At this point Im thinking CPU yesterday morning the system was magically booted into windows ok. After loading the Windows Updates and Norton Systemworks.. after rebooting the system died again same place... after about 5 reboots it went back into windows again. i played in windows for about 10 minutes when suddenly the screen went black. the monitor went to powersave... Nothing.. Ordered a new cpu and MB from Outpost should be here today will update after I install it.

I really feel for you mon. These 3 weeks have been a nightmare for me. Good Motherboards (Abit etc..) are high quality components that hardly turn wrong under normal conditions unless a capacitor has visibly exploded or there is a heap on top of the capacitor with the casing almost shooting off.

CPU's have never gone wrong in my experiance unless overclocked or a fan had stopped working. You know you could have plugged in an old Socket A CPU to test if it was the CPU and it would work if you set it up in Bios...

I have few bits and pices of PC lying around I may make another PC but not today lol.

try a new VGA card one PCI and one AGP. Also, look for puffy caps on the motherboard.