No boot No beep No nothing

Hi: Have a friends machine and when powered I get juice to the HD, CPU fan and opticals but that seems like all there is. No entry to Bios and no boot, no display at all.
It is an older machine with a slot 1 and a Brilliantx QDI mainboard(read manual but no help).
Have tried, swapping ram, re setting CMOS, changing battery and re setting all connections. No luck booting to floppy either, beginning to suspect mainboard.
Appreciate any thoughts

Thanks

 

You are probably right on the money. Machine like that - pull all cards and memory, reseat video and reseat memory, reset CMOS and if no action, yank all the led, power switch and reset switch wires, try jumping power pins with a s_crewdriver blade and if still no go, have a cold one and be thankful you didn't waste any more time on it.



edit to clarify: assume you understood - no cards except video when you try to fire it up.

 

If you find time between cold ones , try booting with the HDD disconnected, the floppy drive disconnected or the keyboard disconnected, you may fluke finding one of those has gone bad (but not likely).

Scour your braincells in case you may know of another about the same vintage that someone may have stored away after upgrading. Between the two you may end up with something better than the first. My sister's school (she's a teacher) gave me their old machines. From 5 or 6 I made up 3 very decent student/internet-crawler machines (and got a 30Gb hardrive for my trouble ).

Matt

 

One more thing. Check the connection to the monitor. If the VGA cable isn't connected well (or if a pin got bent), you would also get the same results -- at least with every system I've used. You can simulate this on a working PC by trying to turn it on with the monitor turned off.

 

Followup

Still stuck and not planning on spending too much more time on this after the above suggestions. The only other items of note are that when the system is plugged in the power light glows dim, even when the switch is thrown on the PS, the monitor immediately switches to standby as soon as the cable is connected(3 different cards, 2 agp and 1 pci) and the HD spins up and stays that way as long as the power is on(activity light solid).

Appreciate the help.

 

Solved

Ended up being the processor, grabbed a spare from a friend and good to go.

Thanks

 

Nice catch. Congratulations.