It is highly unlikely to be a cd drive, although any device is a potential point of failure. If the system is totally unresponsive, its more likely to be a power supply or possibly a motherboard. The motherboard will show a light when the system is plugged into power. If you remove the power cable, the light will eventually fade out. Even though the light is on, it doesnt rule out power supply failure.

Do you have any flashing lights on the front of the system when you try to power it on? Another thing you can try is removing devices (cards, cd drives) one by one, trying to power on the system before moving on to the next. If the system powers on after removing a particular device, put back everything except that device and try again. That should trace down the problem to a particular device.

The light on the Motherboard is on when ever the cord is plugged in. The lights don't indicate any problems. It even turns it self on now. I'm beginning to think its the power switch, even though I didn't think it was.

Thats the problem, the warranty ran out the 8th.

Gonenuts,

The directions I gave should have given you a place to start, I would suggest you exercise your warranty and contact Dell by phone to touble shoot this issue.

Best Regards





God, grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway,
the good fortune to run into the ones I do and the eyesight to tell the
difference.

---

CD/RW Link

Hi Gonenuts,

It figures, you should follow "snaps" advice to test each device, however you truly need to post this question in the Dimension-General Hardware conference, I too doubt very seriously this is related to a optical drive.,
I am not trying to run you off, simply want you in a better conference more in line with your problem.

Best Regards





God, grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway,
the good fortune to run into the ones I do and the eyesight to tell the
difference.

---

CD/RW Link

Message Edited by Predator on 09-23-2004 08:49 PM

Gonenuts,

I had done a quick search in that conference, sorry I must have missed your post, my bad. Well you can pretty much rule out an optical drive bye simply disconnecting the IDE cable from the motherboard and the Power Cable for drive. If the problem does not go away, I`ll go out on a limb here and say it is not the drive 99.98% probability.
I just checked, a number of our Regulars that frequent this conference are currently on-line, post a new message

Best Regards





God, grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway,
the good fortune to run into the ones I do and the eyesight to tell the
difference.

---

CD/RW Link

I posted this in the general hardware area and I didn't get an answer, an I read somewhere that this could be caused by either a CD drive, a Hard Drive, or even a Video Card. Thanks for the info.

Gonenuts, I see you've posted this in the CD/DVD, BIOS, hard drive, general hardware, and video forums. Did you check for answers at any of those places?

Yes, I have email notification enabled. I wasn't sure want it was, thats why I posted this in those sections also.

And so you've tried what?