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Dimension 5150 Will Not Start
Over the past few days, my machine has been incessantly re-booting itself after less than a minute or so of operation. From time to time, it would go to the "Safe Mode" input screen, but would immediately continue the boot in normal mode.
When I talked to someone who has a fairly good knowledge of PC's suggested I install new RAM as that may be the issue, and my machine only had 512 anyway, that seemed reasonable to me.
New RAM was installed, and the machine booted a few times, but would only stay up for a minute or so and then went to re-booting as it had previously done.
It then went to a state where you had to press the power button several times to get it to boot, but it never really got itself up and operating. I did get into the F2 screen once on boot, but after a minute or so, it went dead.
Now the machine has only an amber light on the power button, and will not even attempt to boot up. Update - After sitting with the power on button pushed for start up (not held, but pushed once - amber light displayed) for a while, the machine will attempt to start - makes it to the Safe Mode Screen, then stops the boot - sits there with a solid Green Power light - No Dell Diagnostic lights or Beep Codes
Please provide any guidance possible, it is appreciated.
shesagordie
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March 16th, 2009 14:00
trey723
If you are comfortable around computers, you could try the following.
Unplug the cord from the power supply, hold the power button in for about 15/20 seconds, open the case, unplug the 24-pin connector from the motherboard and jump the Green wire to one of the Black wires, reconnect the power cord and if power supply fan and hard drive runs, the PSU should be good.
Note: Do not remove any wires from the plug, use a small piece of wire or a paper clip as a jumper.
Power supply checks out and the system still does not work, again remove the power cord, hold power button in for several seconds to discharge the residue power, reconnect the 24-pin connector to the motherboard.
Remove all the PCI cards, the video card [if applicable], memory, all peripherals, disconnect the data and power cables to all the drives, then check that the front panel cable is connected to motherboard, with nothing else connected to the system, reconnect the power cable and power the system on.
If you do not get any beep codes or no diagnostic lights on the front/back panel, then it would appear that motherboard has died.
Bev.
trey723
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March 18th, 2009 06:00
Thanks for the help so far. Here's what happened, and what is happening.....
I followed your instructions verbatim. It appeared that the PSU is working, as the hard drive and fans were operating.
After removal of all cards there was no activity upon restarting system.
I decided (based on some other threads) to pull the battery and re-install. That had no affect either.
I reconnected/reinstalled everything, and just left the system sitting there, energized. After quite some time, the system decided to start up. But all is not normal.
First, it stops during inital boot and gives the following message: "Floppy diskette seek error" F1 to continue, F2 for setup utility. (There is no floppy connected to system, btw).
I used this opportunity to go into the BIOS Startup utility and look around. I didnt see anything that was intuitively obvious to change except I shifted to to a slower boot up. I also looked at the event log, and there was nothing there except Keyboard absent messages (Until this point, I did not have it attached).
Fron there, I allowed the system to continue the boot. It would get to various points in the booting process before it would die again. Sometimes it would try to startup again immediately, sometimes it took a while.
It eventually got all of the way through a boot, and I was able to log into Windows. I was able to connect to the internet and went to the Dell site to run the PC Checkup. Here are the noticable results:
Priotity Items needing attention: CPU Registers Test, CPU Level 2 Cache Test, Hard Drive Funnel Test, Hard Drive Random Seek Test, SMART Status Test, Memory Address Test, CMOS Pattern Test, PCI Status Test, CMOS Checksum Test.
I have been able to extract specific files, pictures, etc., when the system is operating. The computer will typically last about 5 - 10 minutes before it just gives up and shuts down.
What now? Thanks So very much, in advance!
Trey