Is it dead?

**MomToTwoBoys** · 09-13-2009, 05:18 PM

The HDD light stays solid and there's no screen showing on my monitor. I tried unplugging and replugging in the PSU cord and the monitor-to-video card cord, but nothing. There's no beep sound when the BIOS is loading, which leads me to believe that the HD is dead.

The PSU fans will continue to spin, as does the video card fan and my secondary fan.

The only part that was never replaced was the HD. The PSU, video card, RAM, etc are all newer parts (even the motherboard and processor).

Could my HD be dead?

**Linus** · 09-13-2009, 09:26 PM

Did it boot before this? Did anything change from when it did boot to now? Do you have another computer you could attach the drive to in order to see if the drive is ok? It could be the motherboard or other component rather than the hard drive.

**MomToTwoBoys** · 09-13-2009, 11:14 PM

It booted before, but it would always throw the computer into sleep mode. I thought that the kids had messed with the settings in the computer itself, but no luck there.

It wouldn't beep as if it was loading the BIOS, so we figured that it was something else besides the HDD. We took the HDD out and let it sit outside of the case, then DH would boot the system and see if it would spin on the inside of the HDD case. Sure enough, it did, so it wasn't the HDD that was going. There was power going to the motherboard, but I guess it wasn't enough.

It was a sufficient enough power supply unit to run lots of applications, but I guess it had run out of juice. There was no burning smell and all of the fans were running, so that's what fooled me into thinking that it wasn't the PSU.

DH just gave me my machine and got himself a laptop since what I do wouldn't run on his laptop. We're going to have to get a SATA to USB cable and pull the information off of the old HDD so that I can have it. I had a lot of stuff on it that cannot be redone (my book, my pictures, budgeting spreadsheets, etc.) which makes me all sad.

**Linus** · 09-13-2009, 11:17 PM

You can replace the power supply. Why not get a new one since it's a lack of power and upgrade it to one that provides more power?

As for the hard drive, you can get an external drive bay that will allow you to access the drive as if it was an external one. Tiger Computers is a good place (they should run about $10-15).