Minor disaster

[Sam Varshavchik]

MR ZenWiz writes:

> I just came home from fumigation exile and tried to reboot my main desktop.
>
> It comes up as far as displaying the mobo emblem and stops there - no
> keyboard input (wired usb), except I can ctl-alt-del to restart again.
> It won't go into the bios, so I can't even boot a live usb.
>
> I vaguely recall seeing this before, but it's been way too long for me
> to recall,
>
> Any suggestions or pointers ASAP would be superb.

There's a tiny chance that this kind of a behavior is due to a flaky USB  
device. Disconnect all external USB hubs and devices, except for the  
keyboard. Maybe even disconnect the keyboard, to see if it makes a  
difference.

But, the usual source of this is a hardware failure. Temporarily pull SATA  
cables out of the internal disks, see if the system goes up until the point  
it complains about no boot devices being available. If still nothing, RAM  
sticks is the next suspect. Check your motherboard's manual to see which RAM  
sticks can be pulled, hopefully you have 2 or 4 RAM sticks, and the  
motherboard can come up with just one or two. Remove half the RAM sticks, if  
still no dice, pull the remaining half, and replace them with the first  
half, and if still no dice, you've pretty much ruled out all user- 
replaceable components at this point. Without any external USB devices  
plugged in, and without the hard drives online, and with alternative RAM  
sticks, your motherboard is bricked. Pull the hard drives, replace the  
motherboard, drop the hard drives in, try to boot them.

But if the system comes up with the hard drives unplugged, that's a small  
consolation. Hard drives are cheap to replace, but then you'll have to  
reinstall and recover whatever data can be recovered.


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