No boot device available?

[Qwerty123456]

To be honest, I'm not quite sure where to put this, but I'm gonna take a shot at posting it right here, so here we go.

I talked to someone from a local compter repair shop via phone yesterday, and he walked me through a few things in an attempt to get my computer back up and running. Yesterday while I was talking to him, the situation was basically that a week ago, I was trying to hook a CD/DVD burner up to my computer, and failed horribly. Didn't get it hooked up, and ended up messing my computer up a lot in the process. Refused to turn on, and only beeped at me. Well, after I got off the phone with him, I toyed with it a little more. Turns out, the memory card thing wasn't fully inserted. So I got that fixed up, and now the computer is actually turning on. But there's still a few problems, and I'm enclosing a few pictures of the computer taken with my digital camera yesterday. I was about to call back and update the guy I spoke to about the situation, when I realized that my phone line is down. Any help you guys could offer while I'm waiting for the phone line to come back up would be greatly appreciated.

 

[The_Other_One]

Pull any expansion cards and remove any drives(power and interface). Check it doesn't throw any errors with only the bare essentials connected.

 

[Qwerty123456]

I'm computer illiterate when it comes to wiring and such, so bear with me please. I'd rather not pull any wires unless I'm positive of the outcome, but thanks for the suggestion.

 

[Platinum]

The wide box at the top. Unscrew that little screw and just pull the card up to remove it. The little box on the bottom of the picture... there are 2 cables there. The first... which is the wide flat cable connects to the Motherboard. Disconnect that. That allows the computer to talk to that device. The 2nd cable... the one with different colored wires... thats the power cable.

I think that's the only things you need to unplug, from what I can see... do those 2 things and try turning on the computer and see what happens. If everything works like normal then we need to determine which is causing the problem.

If it works fine after the 2 things are disconnected, first stick that card back into the wide red box int he picture (first thing I had you remove). Make sure it fits in securely and it's all the way in. Turn on the computer. If it works, turn off the computer, remove the card, and try just the CD-ROM - if I'm correct, the cd drive alone will make it not work again. If this is the case then the CD-ROM drive is causing the problem.

If sticking the card back in (first thing I told you to remove) makes it not work again, try the CD-ROM alone... If the CD-ROM works, then it is that card.


This isn't too hard to do, but if you don't feel comfortable then bring it to a professional, they will probably charge you though...

 

[Qwerty123456]

Ah, damnit. I had a response typed, then IE spazzed on me. Copied the response so I wouldn't have to retype, then accidentally copied over it with something from MSN to my girlfriend. Damn you. But anywayy..

Thanks for the help, Platinum. I'll be sure to try everything out once I get home, but even that doesn't make too much logical sense to me, since the first thing you told me to unplug was my non-functional modem. If, per chance, you meant for me to remove the memory, which is the only other card shaped object within the tower as far as I can tell, that won't work too well. That was my initial problem, and only after reinserting the memory card did the system start up instead of simply beeping at me.

I bought a new tower today, though, so I suppose I won't be in such a rush to get the original tower fixed. After reaching the menu posted previously, I went to "Boot Sequence", because it seemed to make the most sense to me. Once there, I encounted the following screen:

Seems to me that neither of those two should say "Not installed".. any suggestions on how to install if I can't even get the computer fully started up?