PC won't boot or anything

[ryan010101]

A home user awakes to find his PC "locked up". He turns it off and then it wouldn't boot up. He brings it into work (this is where I come in) and as soon as I turn it on I notice the harddrive is making a very loud whirling noise. So I tell him it seems is harddrive is dead (I put it in another PC and the same thing happened).

So he gets a new hd and I put it in with a Windows 2000 disc in the drive. Everything looks ok but 20 seconds into loading windows it just stops and locks up. I restart and nothing happens, it just powers on and nothing. I replaced the IDE cable and that does nothing. I put different memory in and it starts to do something but then it just hangs.

Any one have any suggestions as to what the problem is?

thanks
Ryan

 

[ski]

Was the new HD partitioned and formatted?

 

[ryan010101]

No, it didn't get that far. After about 20 seconds into the process after you boot to a Windows 2000 disc (while it's loading all those files), it just hung. That was the first and only time it even started the windows install process. I also tried booting to the disc the hd came with and nothing happened. It doesn't even try to boot to a floppy nor can I get into the bios setup screen.

 

[ski]

It's possible that the old HD damaged either the MB or the power supply.

 

[edfair]

As a matter of habit, failure to load is almost always memory. Sounds like he had something bad, and you put in something better but not good enough.
Until a minimal system gets loaded nothing can be done to the HD.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[ryan010101]

Ed, I'm not sure what that means. I put in memory from another PC I know works. Not sure how it could be "not good enough".

thanks