"Mr Koko" wrote in message
...


Remove the hard drive. Strange as it may seem, a dead hard drive can
cause both floppy and CD boot failure. Same goes for a bad CD-Drive and
floppy as well so you might need to try each one separately to resolve
it.

Plus, since you're having problems with an 'unknown' system, meaning
you've never seen it run, you should not 'assume' that anything on it is
cabled or jumpered correctly. I.E. check it all.





I agree with HD problem especially if the 'puter has been sitting for a
while. What I ran into once with a Compaq was the same thing. How I got it
running was to lift the front of the pc up about 4 or 5" during boot up
just before the error message and then drop it! The jolt got the drive
spinning up and it booted fine after that.
My computer was sitting in a unheated garage for a couple of months during
cold weather and I didn't care too much about it since I was using my
"new" system in a heated house. Come to think of it I might of dropped it
a couple of times in rapid succession to get it going, either way I had
nothing to lose. (the PC repair guys are probable mad at me now for
letting their biggest repair trick out of the bag :-)

MrKoko


With the large heatsinks used today, the socket might rip right out of the
motherboard if you drop it too hard (I've seen this on PC's that have been
shipped), not to mention cracking the motherboard or something else.

Then there is also the old "shock damage" that may occur.



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