I'm having a tough time with one of my PCs that's refusing to boot. It started with some problems in Windows Explorer, and after a restart (which followed a Windows update), I ended up with a black screen. After several forced restarts, it finally booted up and completed the update, but the Explorer issues came back. Now, whenever I try to restart, I get a black screen without even reaching the BIOS. The VGA LED lights up but I don't think it indicates anything noteworthy since it usually goes off after booting. I've tried a bunch of things: spamming DEL to enter BIOS, resetting the BIOS with a jumper and by removing the battery (there's no USB port for flashing), cleaning out the dust, checking power cables, swapping RAM sticks, removing the graphics card and using integrated graphics, and reinstalling the CPU with fresh thermal paste. It's frustrating that I can't even access the BIOS. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
1 Answer
You might want to try booting your PC with just the essentials: remove everything except the CPU, CPU cooler, the 24-pin power cable, and the 4/8 EPS power cable. Check your motherboard manual to identify if it has diagnostic LEDs or a speaker. Power it up and see if it throws up any errors. Normally, if the motherboard and power supply are functioning, you should at least get a RAM error showing up.
I have an EZ debug LED setup on my MoBo. After trying your suggestion, the DRAM LED came on instead of the VGA one. Any idea what that means?