How To Diagnose A Hardware Problem On A Computer That Wont Boot?

Hi my name is Roger Ahuja and I'm going to take a couple of minutes to talk to you about what to do when your computer doesn't turn on and how you can possibly diagnose it. The first thing we want to look at is see if we're getting any power to the actual computer. You can check for fan noise, you can check to see if there's any lights on the front of it. Anything that's going on with the tower as far as the fan spinning and so forth. If there's nothing turning on on the computer, then obviously check to make sure it's got electricity going to it. That it didn't get unplugged or something. If you have it plugged into a surge strip. Maybe it's a bad surge strip. If you've checked both of those, it's more than likely a bad power supply in the system. There's also some cases where a motherboard could be shorting out the power supply. At this point, if you're comfortable doing it and you have the resources available. You want to get a grounding strap, you could try changing out the power supply at least temporarily plugging in a power supply to see if that fixes the problem or not. That would at least identify whether it's the power supply or not. Let's assume for a minute that your computer is turning on. You're getting fan noise you're getting lights on the front. Then the next step would be to see are there are any beep codes coming out of the computer? If there are beep codes coming out of the computer that usually means that the motherboard & the power supply are functioning properly. Because the beep codes are usually generated by the motherboard. That would usually suggest that you might have a bad ram module in there a bad video card or some sort of a bad add on card. At that point again using a grounding strap, you might want to take out one of the ram modules and alternate them to see if one of the ram modules is bad. You can try a different video card in there. If there's any add on cards that are optional, you can remove them from the system temporarily to see if that fixes the problem. So let's assume that the computer turns on and it's not beeping, the next step obviously is are we getting anything on the screen at all? If we're not getting anything on the screen at all, then it could be a bad monitor at that point, let's try a different monitor. It could be the cable itself for the monitor again power to the monitor. Make sure the monitor light is turning on. The other thing it could also be is a bad video card or bad motherboard. A lot of times the video cards are built on the motherboard so if that portion goes, then you wouldn't get any video. If your computer does turn on but it's not beeping and you are getting something on the screen but it's not booting into windows. Let's start with are we getting the windows logo or not. If we're not getting the windows logo and you're just getting a blinking cursor on the top left or you're getting a boot MGR error message or a NON SYSTEM DISK error message. Those could be possibly a failing hard drive. It could also be a corrupt operating system. It's really hard to tell at this point which one of those two it is. The 1st thing I would suggest is make a backup of your system. Once you've made a backup, you should run a hard drive test first to eliminate the hard drive as the faulty component. Once you know the hard drive is good then you know you've got a software problem and you can start doing some software diagnostics. And that's all I'm going to cover in this video.