OK this is a rather long story, so please bear with me.
A few months back my pc stopped booting up. I have 2 80 gig hard drives, one of them is a sata and the other an excelstore. The problem went as follows: I hit the power button, screen stays black, keyboard doesnt light up, BIOS doesnt even show, nothing, but it stays on until i force shutdown by holding the button.
I tried a bunch of things, checking the sata cables connecting my HD's, trying the video card, and i managed to fix it for a bit by fiddling with some hardware, but then a few weeks later it happened again. Time went by without me trying to fix it, and a friend had to borrow the drives to get some files and so he had the hard drives for a few weeks accessing files by plugging them in directly to his laptop which had a port for sata.
So i got them back recently and have tried to fix my pc and some interesting stuff happened. I plugged in both hard drives with the sata cables, and i stupidly forgot to plug the power cables into them. BUT the pc turned on and went to a boot menu saying it "boot failure". i checked the BIOS and naturally no hard drives were detected. I finally had the sense to plug the power cabled into the hard drives.
I only plugged a power cable into the excelstore because at the time i couldnt find the other one for the sata drive, and i turned it on. It went to the same boot failure screen, but i gave it the benefit of the doubt because i could have installed windows on the sata and just not remembered. I checked the BIOS and it detected the excelstore hard drive (REMEMBER: the computer is still booting to at least a BIOS screen and a boot failure menu). So i plug in the power for the sata and then BOOM same damn thing happens.
The screen wont show a thing and nothing happens. I tried switching the plugs around a bit, but still nothing happened. I figured i would unplug the SATA drive and try to at least get to the BIOS with the excelstore drive connected because whatever the problem was it seemed to have something to do with the SATA drive, and maybe i could change boot order or boot priority. I unplugged it and made sure the excelstore drive was connected and turned it on, and then STILL the same thing. Black screen with the computer running, keyboard unlit and mouse off. I tried a bunch of different combinations with both hard drives connected, just the sata, then just the excelstore, and then NONE of them to see if anything would happen.
Nothing did, the same black screen.
What does this mean? Why did it start up initially two or three times and then not work no matter what i did.
Here are the specs:
Windows XP 32 bit
4gb ddr2 ram
2 x HDD 80gb, 1 SATA, 1 ExcelStore
Q6600 @ 2.4 GHZ
Nvidia 8800 GT 512mb
Help would be MUCH appreciated
A few months back my pc stopped booting up. I have 2 80 gig hard drives, one of them is a sata and the other an excelstore. The problem went as follows: I hit the power button, screen stays black, keyboard doesnt light up, BIOS doesnt even show, nothing, but it stays on until i force shutdown by holding the button.
I tried a bunch of things, checking the sata cables connecting my HD's, trying the video card, and i managed to fix it for a bit by fiddling with some hardware, but then a few weeks later it happened again. Time went by without me trying to fix it, and a friend had to borrow the drives to get some files and so he had the hard drives for a few weeks accessing files by plugging them in directly to his laptop which had a port for sata.
So i got them back recently and have tried to fix my pc and some interesting stuff happened. I plugged in both hard drives with the sata cables, and i stupidly forgot to plug the power cables into them. BUT the pc turned on and went to a boot menu saying it "boot failure". i checked the BIOS and naturally no hard drives were detected. I finally had the sense to plug the power cabled into the hard drives.
I only plugged a power cable into the excelstore because at the time i couldnt find the other one for the sata drive, and i turned it on. It went to the same boot failure screen, but i gave it the benefit of the doubt because i could have installed windows on the sata and just not remembered. I checked the BIOS and it detected the excelstore hard drive (REMEMBER: the computer is still booting to at least a BIOS screen and a boot failure menu). So i plug in the power for the sata and then BOOM same damn thing happens.
The screen wont show a thing and nothing happens. I tried switching the plugs around a bit, but still nothing happened. I figured i would unplug the SATA drive and try to at least get to the BIOS with the excelstore drive connected because whatever the problem was it seemed to have something to do with the SATA drive, and maybe i could change boot order or boot priority. I unplugged it and made sure the excelstore drive was connected and turned it on, and then STILL the same thing. Black screen with the computer running, keyboard unlit and mouse off. I tried a bunch of different combinations with both hard drives connected, just the sata, then just the excelstore, and then NONE of them to see if anything would happen.
Nothing did, the same black screen.
What does this mean? Why did it start up initially two or three times and then not work no matter what i did.
Here are the specs:
Windows XP 32 bit
4gb ddr2 ram
2 x HDD 80gb, 1 SATA, 1 ExcelStore
Q6600 @ 2.4 GHZ
Nvidia 8800 GT 512mb
Help would be MUCH appreciated