K, set yourself down with a drink and a plate of sandwiches, cos this is going to be a long one.
On Monday night, I shut down my PC. From there, it all went downhill. On Tuesday morning, I hit the power button, but all I got was a load of beeps (eight, IIRC). I decided to leave the problem until I had returned from work. I didn't touch anything inside the box. As it happened, I didn't look at it again until my day off on Wednesday. Now, I've had these beeps before if I'd messed with the configuration of me PCI stuff and I assumed the problem would be something like that. I decided that a Windows reinstall was in order since I'd aquired some other niggly problems (IE6 had gayed up on me, for example).
So I took my master HD and plugged it in to my housemate's comp as a slave disk, to siphon off the data I wanted to save. The drive worked perfectly, BTW. I then formatted the disk and took it back upstairs and plugged it back in to my box. With the clean drive in it, I expected the system to boot off the XP CD. But no.
More beeps.
So I phoned up my computer science student friend, who came round to have a look. He pointed out that it wasn't my HD that was the problem, since the system wasn't even trying to boot. Something was going wrong before the boot seuqence thingy kicked in. Right.
We agreed to try an eliminate the problematic component, since the beep code had been translated via the web to mean something important was missing (or kaput). The CD drives came out, no joy. The two hard drives came out. Nothing. All the PCI gubbinz and me Gforce came out, followed by me memory chip but still I was getting beeps and nothing was happening. All that remained at this point was the mother board and the CPU (an Athlon XP 1800, BTW).
Now, my housemate downstairs has a virtually identical setup, with the same mother board and an Athlon XP 2100. Since he was sixty miles away, it was decided that we would borrow his CPU to test my mother board. We took his processor and shoved it in my box, but still it beeped. Ah-ha, we said, so the mother board is up the creak. I resigned myself to the prospect of having to buy a new board.
Obviously the next thing to do was to put my housemate's computer back together. We stuck the CPU back in and shoe-horned all the gubbinz back in to place. It flat refused to work. The fans seemed to be stuttering a little bit, though we assumed we had simply jammed the fans slightly. While my CS friend fiddled, I went over the road to the shop. 'Pon my return, a couple of minutes later, he grinned at me and told me that now the box wouldn't even power up.
Oh yes, I should mention that the guy whose box I raped is a big lad, trying to join the marines. So at this point I was afraid for my life, as well as my money.
So we tried my power supply, and it worked. Then, miraculously, his power supply started working again in that his mother board was powered, though it wouldn't even beep. Now, I'm told that a non-beeping mother board is a broken mother board. And neither of out boards beeped, though they had power (since the fans ran). Then my housemate came home.
Luckily for me, he had just ridden the sixty miles back here on his bike, so he was too tired to chase me. We decided to buy two new boards, then go to the pub.
Now it's Friday morning, and I'm bunking off work. The two boards have turned up but the problem seems to have persisted. There are still no beeps, and I am hella confused. Thus, I am throwing the challenge open to the HLP massive - if anyone has any ideas or advice, please sing out.
