I have a computer that sometimes when I turn it on will continually seek the harddrives, cd rom and floppy. The video never comes on and the light keep blinking. Sometimes if I hold the start button down and shut it down and restart it, it will come on and boot up. Other times I have go give it a whack before it will come on. What should I be looking for to remedy this?
How old is this 'un-named' computer?
Does it run fine once it's up (and for how long?)
The motherboard back-up battery? Although, you should have received warning messages at boot up prior to this....
A loose cable connector on the motherboard? Gently unplug and reset all of them.
Jonesy
Not too old, A PC Chips K8 A31G motherboard with an AMD Sempron 64
1.8ghz and FSB 800mhz With OpenSuSE 11.1 running Gnome or W2kWill run for days after is up with no problem. Never crashes.
I'll try reseating everything,
I suspect the hard drive is on the verge of failing. There are, of course, other possibilities.
One thing you might do is try to boot the machine from a DOS (or similar) floppy. If it comes up reliably, you can eliminate most of the motherboard problems.
How old is it ?
Bad caps, failing PSU, failing mobo, you name it. The whack may indicate a dry/cold solder joint or a lead-free one gone bad (tin pest / tin whiskers).
Graham
How long is a piece of string ?
Graham
That too. Backing up the entire drive with a cloning program (NOT Norton ) would be wise.
Potentially endless ones.
Graham
Hahahahaha !
Now he'll want to know how to make a boot floppy. What if his PC doesn't have a floppy drive ? Darn useful things.
Graham
A good, honest, competent repairman.
Graham
He does have one. He said so.
I had the same bootup problem with my tower, but it would show up more often when it got cold in the room.(And after a good boot, would continue to run and run.) Seems that the power plug to my hard drive was intermittent (loose internally). Reseating usually made it boot up right away. ...I should just change the power plug and quit messing with it.
M.E.
A Freedos boot CD would probably suffice.
Dave
Considering teh OP's complaint was that it would not power up, I'd guess that the above reply is basically worthless.
Hmmm, there was once a specific, odd problem very much like yours, (but I never banged the enclosure to get it to run) with a AMD pcChips' board of the same era. It turned out to be a defective diskette drive. Replacement allowed this tower to consistently bootup.
M.E.
p.s. This is the first board that I came across in which the bios did prevent a bootup if the installed diskette drive was defective.
I would suggest that you actually read what the OP originally said, and the initial responses.
Even _you_ should know that
Download the version you want, run it and insert a blank 1.44 floppy. When the program is done, the floppy is ready to use.
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