As a favor for a friend I was going to take their old HD (from a pc which died) and plug it into mine so they could get the files off it. So I opened up my computer and switched the ribbon cable from the DVD drive to the old HD, and used a spare power connector. After that, the computer no longer boots up. [sad] It'll power up and whir, fans will come on and the HDs appear to spin up, but there's no video signal at all, and there's no beeps on startup either. Frustratingly even if I take the old HD out again and put it all back to how it was it's still broken, and refuses to boot. I'm getting quite annoyed at it as I don't see how it can be working just fine and then suddenly stop. The only hint as to what might be wrong is the LCD display on the back which goes from "CPU INIT" via "DET DRAM" to "PCI INIT" and then stays there. The motherboard manual (an Asus Striker Extreme) doesn't list what these codes are at all. Has anyone and ideas what could be wrong? Or even how to go about figuring out what's wrong? I've double and triple checked all the connections, and checked for forks. Removing all HD connections doesn't change things, so I think it's before it actually starts booting from them. "PCI INIT" suggests something wrong with the PCI connections, but I've only got a graphics card in there and I've reseated it twice (including in a different slot) and it doesn't make a difference. Any pointers muchly appreciated. Ta.

If there is no beep then it sounds like it is failing the P.O.S.T. I'm not sure whether this includes the S.M.A.R.T hard drive test, i have a feeling it doesn't. Have you tried reseating all of your components?

I've tried reseating the graphics card, other than that the only other cards is a tiny little one for the on-board audio, the CPU and the RAM. I really don't want to touch the CPU or RAM since they've got huge heatsinks on them and I'm not sure how (and I'd probably not be able to get them back on again).

What's baffling me is that I really didn't do anything except plug an extra HD in and take it out again. I suppose it's possible that it tried to boot off it and messed something up, but I should still get some kind of video out in that case.

The only thing I can think of right now is that the graphics card is broken somehow (which would explain the "PCI INIT" message and the lack of video signal). But I don't see how that could have happened. Does anyone know how to narrow it down to the graphics card or not (given that I don't have a spare PC to try it in)?

If the gfx card couln't be detected properly then beeps should occur (AFAIK no BIOS continues booting when the graphics isn't available). From my personal experience I would say that the motherboard is defect. The symptoms are very similar to the dead of my P4P800 2 years ago.

E.g. pull out the graphics card, boot, and wait on beeps. If none occur, then I still bet on the motherboard.

EDIT: My MoBo died simply at switching the computer on. No altering of hardware at all.

I think when I tried it last night without the graphics card I had exactly the same result as with it in (ie. no beeps). What's annoying is that I can't remember what the sequence was when it booted up normally - I have a funny feeling that it doesn't actually beep since it's got the little status LED at the back.

My guess would be the power supply, and then the motherboard in second place if the power supply is cleared as being functional.

After some quick researching:

Quote: "If it gets stuck at the "DET DRAM" message, you need to somehow increase the voltage to 2.1V as the default of 1.9V might be too low. How to do that? You can either try the workaround suggested earlier by someone else in this thread, or you can keep on restarting until you get lucky and can enter the BIOS (I found that I could boot successfully 50% of the time). Or, you could try removing one stick of RAM (leaving one inside) and see if you have better luck trying to boot."

It is possible that the initial spike of power required to get all hard drives initially spinning may have been too much for the power supply with the addition of the new hard drive. This in turn may have caused one of the rails to malfunction or go bad, one of which may have been part of the main power cable that supplies power to the ram and other peripherals (the addition of the extra 4 pins of the main atx power connection was partially to add power to the pci-e slots i believe). So, i'd check the power supply first.
Though, one troubleshooting process that you should do is to remove all but the essential hardware. Meaning takeout all hard drives, optical drives, all but one stick of ram, all fans except for the ones required (I.e. heatsinks), all cards (except for video)...etc. This is to make sure it is not a faulty component that is causing POST to fail, or causing a particularly bad irq conflict or the like.

Oddly, it booted normally today after doing nothing but leaving it switched off all night. I did leave it properly switched off at the wall for all that time though, so something power-supply related does sound plausible. Perhaps plugging in the extra HD pushed the power supply over the edge and it needed to cool down or something.

Of course now I'm paranoid it's going to happen again next time I shutdown and reboot...

Quote: Original post by OrangyTang
Oddly, it booted normally today after doing nothing but leaving it switched off all night. I did leave it properly switched off at the wall for all that time though, so something power-supply related does sound plausible. Perhaps plugging in the extra HD pushed the power supply over the edge and it needed to cool down or something.

Of course now I'm paranoid it's going to happen again next time I shutdown and reboot...

Can you run memtest or orthos (running the mem test option)?
I just read that "CPU INIT" may be associated with bad/faulty ram. However, it is likely that your power supply is not giving the ram enough juice which could be causing it to throw errors.

Quote: Original post by Jarrod1937

Quote: Original post by OrangyTang
Oddly, it booted normally today after doing nothing but leaving it switched off all night. I did leave it properly switched off at the wall for all that time though, so something power-supply related does sound plausible. Perhaps plugging in the extra HD pushed the power supply over the edge and it needed to cool down or something.

Of course now I'm paranoid it's going to happen again next time I shutdown and reboot...

Can you run memtest or orthos (running the mem test option)?
I just read that "CPU INIT" may be associated with bad/faulty ram. However, it is likely that your power supply is not giving the ram enough juice which could be causing it to throw errors.

Aren't those problems when people have the boot hang on CPU INIT though? This got past CPU INIT and got stuck on PCI INIT.

Quote: Original post by OrangyTang

Quote: Original post by Jarrod1937

Quote: Original post by OrangyTang
Oddly, it booted normally today after doing nothing but leaving it switched off all night. I did leave it properly switched off at the wall for all that time though, so something power-supply related does sound plausible. Perhaps plugging in the extra HD pushed the power supply over the edge and it needed to cool down or something.

Of course now I'm paranoid it's going to happen again next time I shutdown and reboot...

Can you run memtest or orthos (running the mem test option)?
I just read that "CPU INIT" may be associated with bad/faulty ram. However, it is likely that your power supply is not giving the ram enough juice which could be causing it to throw errors.

Aren't those problems when people have the boot hang on CPU INIT though? This got past CPU INIT and got stuck on PCI INIT.

Oh ok, nevermind. I read that wrong, i thought you stated it hung at cpu init once, but if it passed that then disregard that last post.