Computer not booting

[Pennanti]

I have an AcerPower 650 mHz with 128 mb RAM, integrated video and ethernet that will not boot. Once power is turned on the screen just shows a mish mash of colors, there are no beeps and the hard drive light is continuously on. Somebody had been messing around with the machine and had slaved another hard drive to the one in the machine and in the process crashed the machines hard drive. He then messed around with the hard drive eventually taking it out and trying to fix it by slaving it to another computer. The hard drive eventually ended up on my hands and I had to use the recovery disk to return the hard drive to its original factory condition. I did this on a machine identical to the one the hard drive came out of and the drive worked fine. Now I put the drive back into the original machine and the problem described above occurs. Am I right in assuming that it is probably not the hard drive but possibly the bios or mother board got messed up too?

 

[jrbarnett]

When they put the hard drive into the other machine, was it set up as a slave drive on the IDE channel? (check the jumper on the drive). It MUST be set as master for its channel.

John

 

[ski]

Is the HD recognized by your system's BIOS?

If so, then the best thing to do is to wipe the HD, and reinstall the O/S, drivers, applications, etc., on your computer.

 

[franklin97355]

If all you get when you turn the computer on is a mishmash of colors it's not the hard drive. Take out all the IDE devices and any other cards you can, clear the CMOS and see what you get. Until the computer can boot you can't fix the HD.

 

[Pennanti]

Thanks for the replies. The hard drive is set as the master and the master end of the IDE cable is plugged into it. The thing is the bios screen does not even show only the color mishmash. I will try your suggestion franklin and let you know how it goes.

 

[Pennanti]

Hi all. Clearing the bios did not help, but swapping out the memory did. Seems my little friend fried a stick of memory in the process of messing around with everything else.