pc wouldnt boot-up?

Question

i goot up this morning and tried to start my pc up (dell dimension 4700) and all i got was 6 beeps nothing else , monitor/mouse and keyboard wouldnt work at all, re tried several times,even took apart the tower and took the ram out and video card etc and cleaned everything but still nothing, went to try again this afternoon, and i heard a loud swoosh (sounded like a jet of air) and the pc booted up fine .

anyone got an idea as what this could be ?

for some reason im thinking the master hard drive is beginning to fail , dont ask me why its just a guess, but also i think it could be something to do with the pc temp gauge and the fan somehow keeping the pc not running .

if you have any idea's or links i would be happy to look at those solutions , mnay thanks, your hero bsd

also , its windows xp sp2

fao thunder2sys there was a bit of power, enough for the pc to try and start and light up the buttons on the tower and power the disc tray etc, but it seemed not to start any other of the machine up in a way

Answer 1

If you weren't getting any power up, it sounds like the power supply is dying. If it was the hard drive you'd see something on the screen.

Answer 2

The "beeps" are like a form of morse code telling you that there was a hardware failure during the boot up. As the beeps happen long before the computer ever talks to the hard drive, it is never the cause of the beeps.

Had you listened, the six beeps may have been a mixture of long and short beeps (like morse code). If you check the Dell website they have a list of BIOS codes that will tell you what they meant.

You did the right thing by cleaning and reseating the memory (most common cause of beeps) and other connectors.

If you disconnected the hard drive and/or CD/DVD drives, they could make a noise the next time they powered back up. That is probably the "whoosh" you hear.

If you suspect that hard drive is failing, I strongly recommend that you do an immediate backup of all your data - just to be sure.

Answer 3

ya thunder2sys is right power core or supply could be fan but you would still see it boot