PC knocked out by power outage. Powering on causes the fans to start up, the hard drives and optical drives to do whatever they do to make their wee lights flash, but the monitor doesn’t power on. Swapping video cards does nothing, and the machine doesn’t boot the OS as far as I can tell, or at least, it doesn’t make it the point where it enables the network connection.
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Do I need a new motherboard? Is there anything else I can try before that drastic surgery?
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This is a dual bios motherboard. Could that help?
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This machine runs Fedora Core (if I recall correctly, might’ve been Redhat 9). If I have to put in a new motherboard is the OS going to figure out what’s happened and be ok, or am I going to have to do something like put in a third hard drive, install a fresh OS on it, and then recover all my precious (and, naturally, not backed up) stuff from the existing drives?
What you first have to do is isolate whether you have an OS problem (corrupted system files preventing boot) or a hardware problem. Since you mention you have no video signal, you have a hardware problem. if you cannot even get into the motherboard’s bios settings then pretty much it’s hardware.
the pc boot process ends with that beep that means it’s okay, and then goes to access boot devices. if you have a floppy drive you’d hear it access.
Very strange for a power outage to damage hardware. brownouts, spikes, sure, but a sudden interruption of power, never seen anything.
Remove all the crap. Leave only the CPU, heatsink, fan, speaker. If you boot without ram you should get a particular sequence of error beeps (depends on your motherboard bios version). without video card is another sequence. Try without ram + video, if you get the nice beeps that’s encouraging. if you don’t even get those, motherboard sounds pretty toasted to me.
