zbook, I hear a fan turn on, probably CPU fan but no beep codes or drive spinning. As I said previously, I believe the hard drive is dead because I took it out and connected to a USB adapter and tried to read it on my laptop. It wouldn't appear in File Explorer and I couldn't feel or hear the drive spinning. Also, the CD tray works and the power button is lit.
The drive not showing up when connected with a USB adapter doesn't necessarily mean its dead. It may not be getting enough power to run via the USB adapter. Does that adapter have a separate power supply? Does the drive show up in disk management? The drive has to be formatted and have a drive letter assigned for it to show up in file explorer. If its file system is corrupt it may not show up. You may also want to have a look in device manager to if the USB adapter is detected. Is it a full sized desktop drive or a slim small laptop drive? Spinner or SSD?
alphanumeric, the drive is a full-sized desktop drive. The USB adapter has 2 usb connectors to plug into the laptop; the drive does not show up in disk management when connected by USB. I'll have to check whether Device Manager shows the USB connected. In the meantime, I've changed the CMOS battery but it did not cause any change to the computer. It's looking more and more like a motherboard or graphics problem but we shall see.
If the drive is no longer connected to the suspect PC and the suspect PC still refuses to boot/post then the HDD isnt the issue I would say. Does sound like a MOBO issue tho :)
C'mon guys....
The OP should at least get a boot screen. That even if there is no hard drive installed, the OP should still get a boot screen saying "not boot drive found" or something like that on the screen. The fact that there is NOTHING on the screen either says monitor or GPU problem.
Maybe I'm missing something but I think that should be solved first!
@ the OP, did you check the monitor is working properly? If you've got access to a different monitor, can you try in on the PC first? If the monitor is good, than the next step is the video card.
Can't check Device Manager or anything else requiring a screen if there's no video.
To figuring out why it won't POST. I do believe its an all in one. You could try an external monitor, not sure that will help though? I think the issue is deeper than that. If the video card has failed it won't make any difference. No beep codes isn't a good thing. That's about as bad as it gets.
I keep mentioning the PSU which has to send/receive the correct handshaking signals to/from the motherboard to power on. Has the PSU operation been tested? The PSU may be 'receiving power' but that doesn't mean it is turning on to output the various voltage rails to the motherboard. A failed PSU or a PSU having a failed +5V standby circuit would give the symptoms reported.
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