[Rusty100]

Hello fine peoples! I have a bit of a problem right now.

I have a HTPC, which I use basically as a media server. Today it up and died on me. I usually leave it on, and during the day today it disappeared from the network. I checked it out and couldn't get any screen input.
Upon restarting it, still no screen input. But also no post beeping. No activity of any kind, other than powering on and kind of staying idle. Not visibly working at all.

So my question is, what are some of the things that could cause this? Bad cmos battery? Dead GPU? Dead HDD? I would die if it's the hard drives.

Basically, what are the things I should be looking for that could be causing the computer's blank state.

I appreciate any help I can get on the issue. If I can't solve it myself I'll have to take it to be troubleshooted.

Problem keywords:
No post beep.
Not booting.
No screen input.

Already tested: powering on with one of the two sticks of ram at a time. Still same problem.

[prodirus]

Well, one thing I'm pretty certain about is that your HDDs are probably fine. You could try putting them into another PC just to make sure.


You've tested your RAM, so we can probably rule that out as a cause.

A dead CMOS battery (probably) wouldn't cause a motherboard not to boot, it'd just fuck up your BIOS settings and system clock.

Pretty much every single component (other than maybe CD drives and the HDD) could cause it not to POST. Your motherboard could have failed, your CPU could have failed, your GPU could have taken a shit, heck, a dying PSU might even cause issues. Even worse, any combination of the above could be the cause.

You could try reseating the GPU, I had a similar problem once with a friend's PC, and taking out the card and putting it back in seemed to fix it.

If you have another similar PC laying about, you could try transplanting components to test them out. Be warned, though, if a component is badly damaged, it could damage the parts in your healthy PC.

[Rusty100]

Yeah I had tried booting without the GPU, and also with putting it back in. Same issue.

I do have another PC but I don't want to fuck about with it, since that one works right now and I don't want to mess it up.
I'm going to just take it and get it troubleshooted. Thanks though, nice to have the HDD's life not so much in question.
The only things left I guess would be the mobo and cpu. Both of which are relatively new. So that'd be a damn shame. Better than dead hdd's though.

Edited:

The store I took it to found the problem immediately.

Sitting in the PC I had one of these:



And guess what!


It leaked!

[AGMadsAG]

prodirus posted:

A dead CMOS battery (probably) wouldn't cause a motherboard not to boot, it'd just fuck up your BIOS settings and system clock.

Pretty much every single component (other than maybe CD drives and the HDD) could cause it not to POST.

I'm sorry but a dead CMOS battery CAN cause the motherboard to not POST. Same can a fried HDD/CD drive.