Major system problems, please help

Z

Zekenstein

n00b
Joined
Feb 17, 2006
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Ok, here's the deal. Built an AMD Athlon XP based system like 8 months ago for a friend of mine, everything was going great then one day it quit. he had been having major spyware problems that i had been trying to fix and he said "it started not to work and eventually stopped working altogether". I couldn't get it to start. It would kick on (all the fans and stuff) but a scrape-like buzzing sound would come from the hard-drive are and nothing would happen (i.e. I wouldn't hear the hard drive start to spool). So far I've replaced the PSU, hard drive, and Motherboard to no avail, it still does the same weird sound for like 1 second after I try to start it up and it doesn't even post the BIOS or anything. It's running a radeon 9200 with an athlon xp 2700+ i think with a compatible mobo, new hard drive etc. I had been running a low overclock on the video card from the time I built it for him. Could the video card be the problem? Im no amateur at building computers but this one has me stumped, if I remove the video card altogether I get a warning beep from the mobo when trying to start so it obviously detects the presence of a video card but I don't know if it is actually functioning. (i mean, it's obviously not to a certain degree but could the ram or CPU be the problem? is it feasible that one of the optical drives could be causing a problem? I already tried switching them out before and it didn't help) THANKS in advance guys, this one is a real frustration for me..
 
sounds to me like perhaps the psu overheated and crapped out, taking the hard drive with it.

first thing I'd do is try another psu.
highly unlikely that an optical drive would cause such problems. if an optical drive is bad, it just won't show up in the BIOS.

and is there really any significant gain by overclocking a 9200? seriously...
and if the overclock was harming the card, he would have seen artifacts when playing 3D games.
 
He said he has already replaced the PSU, Motherboard, and Hard Drive.

Have you tried running bare minimums in the system (i.e. unhook any drives but startup hard drive and remove any unneccesary PCI cards)?

I don't know how the video card could be causing the problem, but do you have a way to swap it out with another vid card just to test?

Also, have you done the basic troubleshooting steps like running one stick of RAM at a time and reseating everything. What kind of temps were you running in the PC before all of this happened?
 
The temps were fine after the overlock, no problems of any kind and great ventilating. the thing ran fine for a while. here's the thing I forgot to mention, i ahd had a cold cathode in there and the guy tried to remove it and it fell, i think ti may have slammed into the video card and snapped off a capacitor or something, is that possible? And ya, I replaced the PSU, Hardrive, and Mobo, so it's either gotta be the CPU, RAm, or Vid card...
 
I do remember one instance when a faulty video card caused me major headaches. Sorry, I missed the statement about already testing the psu.
 
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