Power On But No Go!

H

HiddenTalent

New Member
I dragged an old socket 939 tower that I had canibalized out of the closet in efforts to uprade my mom's business desktop that is still running OMFG Win98!!!

So this is a dell tower, was a sweet tower in it's time... I threw some Ram, HDD, CDROM at the thing and made sure all the connections are good. The hard drive is fresh, as I just formatted it. (via my main tower)

I plug the tower in and the psu is hot, the front panel is hot, the cdrom is hot, the hard drive is NOT hot, and the light on the front wont leave yellow (to turn green to indicate on). And by hot, I mean they have power, and it's constant. The indicator light on the rom drive is on solid...

I know at one point I snagged a jumper from one of the six boards i had in my closet, which this may have been the one...

What should I do now? I'm at a stand still...

BTW I'm throwing Windows 7 Home 32 bit on when I get this thing running properly.

Thanks in advance!
 
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Windows 7 needs at least 1 gig of ram, 3 to kick ass. IIRC, all them motherboard handle is 768 MB. So it's going to be a lost cause installing Windows 7.

If you can get to the BIOS, reset it and maybe you can get the HDD to work. If not, I think you got a bad motherboard.
 
wildbill said:
Windows 7 needs at least 1 gig of ram, 3 to kick ass. IIRC, all them motherboard handle is 768 MB. So it's going to be a lost cause installing Windows 7.

If you can get to the BIOS, reset it and maybe you can get the HDD to work. If not, I think you got a bad motherboard.
Click to expand...


Ehh, I beg to differ, I took two gigs out of this board... I said old... but old in the sense that 939 isn't really around anymore...

Don't know why the board would be bad though, it only went away due to a bad hard drive, and the people wanted an upgrade.
 
So the hard drive is not spinning up? Computer not posting at all? reseat the ram, change out psu, double check your connections, unhook any unnecessary parts not needed at bootup, cdrom, and pci add in cards. Make sure you only have ram, video card (if it doesn't have onboard graphics) keyboard and mouse. Your cdrom light on constantly and hard drive not spinning up is not a good sign.
 
wildbill said:
Windows 7 needs at least 1 gig of ram, 3 to kick ass. IIRC, all them motherboard handle is 768 MB. So it's going to be a lost cause installing Windows 7.

If you can get to the BIOS, reset it and maybe you can get the HDD to work. If not, I think you got a bad motherboard.
Click to expand...

BTW... I took a gig of my 2gigs out of this tower to get online... Comp runs fine on Windows 7 Pro 64.
 
wildbill said:
Windows 7 needs at least 1 gig of ram, 3 to kick ass. IIRC, all them motherboard handle is 768 MB. So it's going to be a lost cause installing Windows 7.

If you can get to the BIOS, reset it and maybe you can get the HDD to work. If not, I think you got a bad motherboard.
Click to expand...

my lappy runs pretty damn good and its got 512mb ram with win 7
 
HiddenTalent said:
I dragged an old socket 939 tower that I had canibalized out of the closet in efforts to uprade my mom's business desktop that is still running OMFG Win98!!!

So this is a dell tower, was a sweet tower in it's time... I threw some Ram, HDD, CDROM at the thing and made sure all the connections are good. The hard drive is fresh, as I just formatted it. (via my main tower)

I plug the tower in and the psu is hot, the front panel is hot, the cdrom is hot, the hard drive is NOT hot, and the light on the front wont leave yellow (to turn green to indicate on). And by hot, I mean they have power, and it's constant. The indicator light on the rom drive is on solid...

I know at one point I snagged a jumper from one of the six boards i had in my closet, which this may have been the one...

What should I do now? I'm at a stand still...

BTW I'm throwing Windows 7 Home 32 bit on when I get this thing running properly.

Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

Which Dell is it? Model number would be nice so that I can draw up some specs for you.
 
I thought you said it was a 939 board? 939 is an AMD based socket. That Dell's probably a 478 or something...not that it's really relevant at this point :P

Anyway, from the sound of it you may have a bad motherboard or perhaps even PSU. The light on the CD-ROM shouldn't stay solid, particularly during POST... Try disconnecting all the drives and see if they function correctly.

If you continue to get nothing, confirm everything else is seated correctly, going with only one stick of RAM (if you have multiples), even get RAM from another system if possible.

Oh, and if you did remove a jumper, you best confirm where it went. If it's missing any jumper, it very well may not POST.
 
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Sounds to me more to me like what happens when you put an IDE cable in with a twist in it.

Here is what I would do. Pull the IDE cables off the back of the drives and see if they spin up first...if they do then the problem was the cable not being installed correctly. Make sure that the pin 1 mark on the drive, the cable and the MB all match up correctly. I see this happen a lot when people use IDE cables that are not keyed.
 
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