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Dell Dimension 4600 doesn't boot

My motherboard and and psu fried after a storm. I replaced them with a 400w qtec psu and a "new" ebay mobo which suspiciously came with a refurbished sticker. No problems so far (3-4 months) until yesterday, when I got a "diskette drive 0 seek failure" message. I unplugged the psu and removed the battery, but no luck. The cpu speed shown is 1.6, when it should be 3.0 and the hd is not recognized. I randomly get "previous attempts at booting this system have failed at checkpoint (USBd)...bla bla". Please, help.

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nobus

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oscardelahoya

ASKER

Yes, I put the same mobo, the psu is different though. how do i run these tests without a diskette drive? should i remove the hd and test it on a 2nd pc? thanks.

nobus

several options for running the tests :
memtest can be downloaded as an iso, and burned to cd - then boot from cd
an alternative is downloading ubcd; it is also a bootable cd, containing memtest and much more.
putting the drive a a slave on another pc (check the jumper) is certainly a good way.

http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/download.html

oscardelahoya

ASKER

Downloading ubcd at the moment, when done will do a sandisk for the dell hd, then will run ubcd and will post the results. cheers,

nobus

ok - have fun !

oscardelahoya

ASKER

1 hour of memtest and no errors. what other tests should I do from ubcd? how do I set the bios (currently on default settings)? Couldn't do a scandisk as the 2nd pc wouldn't boot with the dell hd plugged in ¿?

jvuz

You have to put the disk in the second pc as second disk to perform a scandisk.

nobus

you can try running a disk test: like maxblast, from the cd.
but check first in the bios if it sees your disk correctly. - if not, no test will work

oscardelahoya

ASKER

amazingly I can boot the dell now. will run burnin test.

thanks for your help!

nobus

what did you do ?

oscardelahoya

ASKER

It went like this: 1.-Earlier today, to my astonishment I start the pc without problems 2.-Then I turn it off and plug the USB cables for the printer and the adsl modem (which were on the 2nd pc after the dell failed) 3.-Try to start it but same problems as before. 4.-Remove last 2 USB devices and it boots up... Weird thing isn't it? I think this is why i got ·previous attempts at booting this system have failed at checkpoint (USBd)"...

nobus

Not weird - some motherboards display this behaviour : they do not boot when a usb device is connected.
BUT - it can be it is trying to boot from usb, and you do not wait long enough for the time-out.
So check the bios settings, if something is set to boot from usb...