[OT] Machine won't boot [SOLVED]

[Mike McCarty]

Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> 
> Ok, just for the record --- the problem turned out to be a rather rare 
> situation of both hard drive *and* dvd drive failing simoultaneously. Once 
> both of them were replaced, the machine came back to life. I figured this out 
> by using Alan's approach of removing virtually everything unneccessary, and 
> even substituting vital components with spares (dvd drive, memory and 
> graphics card) one by one and in combinations, in order to find the failing 
> component.

When trying to troubleshoot these recondite problems,
The first step is always reseat everything that can be wiggled. That
means all power connectors, RAMs (used to be chips would creep up
out of the sockets, modern RAM sticks seem to have solved that),
cables to drives, etc. If that didn't fix it, I used always
to remove everything but keyboard, video display all RAM but minimal to
boot the BIOS. If I could get past POST, then add in a boot device
which for me is a floppy my friend, less complicated. If that works,
then add RAM back in one bit at a time (no pun intended). If all
the RAM goes back in, then add one device at a time until it
starts to fail.

With today's machines, that's more difficult. It's hard to take
your printer port card out when it's just a piece of a chip on
the motherboard.

In any case, it's always best to disentangle everything as much
as possible and work with the minimal configuration which can
actually be expected to run (in some sense of the word).

Mike
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