My system is dead! Can it be brought back??

[bioscientist]

My system, an unreliable Akhter PII 266, with an intel al 440 lx motherboard and ATI 3D Rage Pro AGP 2x graphics seems to be well and truly buggered. It wasn't booting properly & would only run in safe mode. So, I took the HDD out to back it up on another PC, replaced it, and now the poor old Akhter won't boot at all. There is no display even for BIOS, and though the CD ROM lights come on & it will eject, it won't read from the floppy drive. Is there anything that I can do to bring it back from the dead??

[Ruslan]

First of all, did You check all components in another good PC? (I mean memory sticks, CPU,video and so on).
Take out of case all devices. Disconnect all cables (except for CPU fan cable ) Leave only CPU,video and memory. No beep sounds at all?
Make sure,what You're not inserted IDE cable in backwards - motherboard won't boot at all in that case.

[gutted]

Agree with last post...

If all you did was take the HDD out and then put it back, there is not much that can have gone wrong. Make sure the IDE cable is correctly into both the mobo and HDD - the red strip should be nearest to the power connector on the HDD and on CDROM. This is a standard, as far as I know. Set this up and if you still have problems try turning it round at mobo end.

Also make sure that you have the HDD jumpers set correctly - did you put the HDD as a slave in the other system...? Although to be fair it probably wouldn't give the symptoms you describe...

I've also got an al440lx and am using an AGP card... Mine is sometimes a bit twitchy if the card moves at all when I'm mucking about with internals. Try taking out the graphics card and either use a PCI card to test or just try re-seating the AGP card. Maybe.

[leptoid]

If all you want to know is whether or not the motherboard is any good, just pull all the ide cable out. Make it no cdrom, no floppy, no hard drives, no sound cards... just the motherboard, video card, and ram. Make sure the motherboard power is still plugged in though otherwise it won't work (obviously). Then add things back 1 at a time, making sure it works before adding another part. Oh, you might want to make sure your bios sees your floppy drive. Sometimes they're stupid like that.