Computer Woes

[billroper]

syalune shipped catalana's new computer here so that she could conveniently take it home in her car. I popped it out of the box and -- as arranged -- set out to boot it up and make sure that it had survived shipping without dislodging anything.

Annoyingly, something is wrong and being extremely difficult to diagnose. I can get the boot screen, but that's pretty much the last thing I ever see. I've tried to boot to the BIOS setup, but it never gets there, although it does acknowledge the DEL keypress and promise to go there.

I'm now being officially confused. I suppose I should have tried unplugging the SATA drives to see if the system would boot to the BIOS then, but that didn't occur to me when I had the box opened up to check it out and all of the peripherals attached. I wouldn't think there'd be a drive failure that would do this, but...

Any thoughts?

Comments

[mdlbear]

I've seen things like that with a bad power supply. Craps out under the disks' start-up load.

[lizneely.livejournal.com]

This is a long shot, but my Dell computer had a hard drive problem that was really hard to diagnose - for me, anyway, not being a hardware person - but I finally found some mention in the back of the manual about watching the pattern and color of the hard drive lights during attempts to boot, to determine what the problem was. It immediately pointed me to the real problem - a failed raid drive - which wasn't too hard to fix once diagnosed.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

My poor new computer! I am sad that it isn't working. *sniffle*

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

I agree with your thought of unplugging the hard drives to see what, if anything, changes.

mdlbear's hypothesis of the power supply is plausible.