When you say “pinging”, do you mean it is making beeping noises during boot up? If so, those could be Post on codes, and may help diagnose the problem.
No it goes ping when it starts up. this is a long sustained repetitive ping with the red light on.
"Explanation: The system is producing constant beeping in no specific pattern, or a fast "ringing" sound.
Diagnosis: This is usually caused by a problem with the system memory, or possibly the video card. The memory is more likely--the system complains long and loud if it can't find any usable memory, as there is no way to even start the boot process when this is the case. The motherboard itself could also be the problem."
A long sustained ping, or is it repetitive? It definately sounds like hardware to me in either case.
While a hard drive crash is a possibility, it isn’t my first instinct. The BIOS should be feeding it’s start screen to the monitor before the hard drive initializes.
This sounds to me like a RAM problem, or worse, a motherboard problem.
The good news in that is it is likely you haven’t lost anything on your hard drive.
The bad news is that if it is the motherboard, it’s time for a new system.
But first, let’s check the RAM. Do you have one chip, or multiple chips of RAM? If you have more than one, remove one at a time and try to boot up. If you get a boot, the one that is out is a bad chip and needs to be replaced. If you only have one, then you will need to buy or borrow another RAM chip to test.
Is this system still in warrenty?