Pc troubles

[Kiwiavenger]

Hey guys.

A few months ago I had some major catastrophic failure of my home brew pc.

Homebrew is running a 550w psu, a phenom ii x6, 8gb gskills ram, nvidia GeForce 8800 (I think) Asus usb3 mboard and 2 Seagate hdd (250 +500 gb hdd) running Windows 7

My boy did something yo it which meant it crashed to a bsod then kept crashing after 5 minutes of use. I managed to back everything up onto an external hdd and formatted both drives I also flashed the bios. Tried reinstalling windows and it just hangs waiting to load and won't accept a fresh copy. It's now not even loading/showing the bios so my feelings are motherboard or cpu anything else I've missed?
I've swapped the graphics card to my back up pc and the psu so I can still get online but now this has packed up and won't load bios. It was working this morning but since reinstalling the graphics card psu and the 500gb hdd it now doesn't work. Both give no beeps from the mb and both won't load even to bios. Spare pc is running an old Intel chip

Any thoughts would be happily accepted! Needless to say the other half is not impressed

 

[Shaun]

If it won't display the BIOS screen then I'd suspect a problem with the motherboard, memory, CPU or GPU - your HDD will only generally create a BSOD post-boot (and TBH I'd probably not worry too much about the CPU at this stage either as they generally just don't work at all once they're fried).

Do you know if your son overclocked the video card at any point? (could have possibly fried the GPU)

I'd start by first removing the video card and using on-board (if it doesn't have any use a spare video card that you know works).

If that doesn't work, try removing all but one of the memory sticks (assuming you have more than one) - or replace the current 8GB stick with a known-good one. Alternate the sticks until you find a faulty one (or rule them out as working okay).

Next I'd clone your boot HDD and remove all the drivers (using Paragon) and then try it in another machine.

 

[tincaman]

Reset the bios, remove everything but the bare minimum for it to boot to bios, eg one stick of memory, no hard drive, no DVD drive, integrated graphics if you have it. Try memory in different slot, use the other stick if you have one as well, If no good borrow a spare psu and try that. Usually at this point it works. If not then probably motherboard.

 

[Kiwiavenger]

The only common bits between the 2 pc's is the gpu, psu and hdd. The gpu I used was working this morning and I took it out of the Pentium to try and get the amd one working.

I was thinking of upgrading the amd motherboard to a sata 3 and usb3 one anyway

 

[Kiwiavenger]

Cheers guys.

Got my old pc back up and running by bare bones then adding bits. Managed to upgrade the wireless networking card too!! It's weird as the graphics card didn't want to work with the old wireless card I had in it even though it did for 3 weeks?

Now to get a new mboard and future proof it a bit (sata and usb3) then go ssd before fixing it all up.


Btw the boy is only 2 1/2 so not sure he's fully versed on overclocking yet. I am though have no need as only playing old star trek and freelancer games! Might chuck on SIM city 4 soon