i have a white-box pc i’ve been asked to look at. started having trouble booting couple of weeks ago.
i first looked at the power supply and swapped it with no results. not even the fan in the new power supply would turn. so, i started unplugging cards and cables to start through them one-by-one to see if i could isolate the problem.
with nothing in the board except for the processor, the cpu fan and the memory, the power supply fan now comes on, i get leds at the front panel and the cpu fan tries to start (does about 1/4-turn and stops).
when i plug in the nic, video card, floppy and cd-rom, i get the same result. the power supply fan spins and i get leds at the front panel. however, when i plug-in the hdd, the system doesn’t power up. so, i replace the hdd.
now i’ve got a new power supply, a new hdd and i’ve verified the other 2 cards, but it STILL won’t boot.
when i plug it all together and power on the supply (NOT THE MAIN CPU POWER SWITCH, but the power supply switch at the back), i get everything on before i even hit the ‘power button’. BUT, there are no beeps from the bios and there is no activity on the monitor, it stays black with an amber ready light.