Once upon a time PC World asked me for some suggestions to test computer repair shops. One of the more diabolical suggestions I had was to put a pin through one of the wires in the parallel cable that connected hard drives in those days. I suggested they put the break right next to a connector so it wouldn’t be easy to see. Then see who could fix the computer correctly.
The only one to pass the test is no longer in business. All the rest suggested a new motherboard. Someone wrote to the editor and said that was asking too much. I replied (via the editor) that a parallel cable had broken in my lab and I had done the troubleshooting to determine it was the cable and not the drive or the motherboard. If I could do it, Best Buy should be able to do it.
I share this little tale to remind you to check all the simple stuff before you spend money on the expensive stuff.
You no longer have to worry that you put your memory sticks in alternating slots, do you? Remember when 32-bit computers were new and all the sticks were 16-bit so you had to add them in pairs in alternating slots?
Fascinating.
I think I have checked/eliminated everything else. No pata stuff, all sata so disconnecting is easy. I should be getting the startup screen even if drives are shot. I get no display so can’t get to setup even. Substituted video card as first thought. No speaker on Mobo but I have a small piezo plugon for the mobo header pins which I plugged on to see if I got any angry beeps - nada. One would think that I should get at least a display on screen telling me ‘you’re dead, Jim’ even if it wouldn’t get to POST but there is no video output at all. And it is the ‘no display’ thing that has me thinking I’ll be doing an autopsy.
Power supply checks good, but I plugged in a spare to verify. So, that’s where I am right now. I can continue disassembly and swap out cpu but that gets a bit more involved since I have water cooling on this beast. That probably will be the next step, although as I said having to dig this deep into it gives me a perfect reason (or excuse) to do an upgrade since the one BIG reason I can’t play with this machine is because when I take it offline (or even reboot for the ever popular Windoze Updates) I start taking flack from those downstream on the network.. ;-)
And FWIW I seem to remember that article on repair shops. Always had a spare ‘test’ pata cable around after that.. (Of course since nothing I have uses pata now - or in the future since it’s considered ‘legacy’ and not even included on new mobo’s - I presently have a slew of ‘spare’ pata cables should you or anyone need one.. ;-)