I used to have this with an old stack. Here's how I'd get it going

You're struggling to get the hard drive to 'post in' and then boot the operating system. It's safe to say your machine is failing you, but still could work for a good amount of time. It's just you need to get it to start up

Loads of little things will do it.

1 make sure all usb's are unplugged (hdd's flash drives, that stops them being read first, leave mouse and keyboard in)

2 When the monitor didn't come on to "post in", I used open the CD drive, and then force the pc to turn off with the power button. Sometimes the cd drive closing on reboot would almost be a little whip for the horse

3 There might be a switch at the back, sometimes I liked to turn the machine off with that switch, then switch it back on, and then power up

4 erm, if there's a little pin button on the front (might have only been white pc's that had this), I used to start up the stack with the power button, and this reset button pressed "usually with a little pin if it's quite small"

5 Make or buy a boot disc called 'parted magic', it boots and linux operating system via the ram. You won't need to do anything, but just let it run (it won't do anything to windows 7)

Often a restart from that will restart the pc fine

It's all a case of pushing your machine into working

One day all the above will work, another they won't. That sort of brings me to point 6. On those days I just used to turn it on, and leave it on, then an hour later, would repeat all the above, and it would probably work

It's all a lesson in the first paragraph though, your machine is dying :)

Posted By: pants, Feb 5, 10:55:45