Recently I removed my hard drives (3) and tried to put them back in. Stupidly, I forgot the combination the SATA cables went in, same with the power cables, now my computer starts but only the fans run. There is absolutely no signal going towards the monitor, any help is appreciated.


Added details:
The PC instantly shuts down after I press the power button once, and I <b>think</b> all the hard drives are running, but it's hard to tell from the sound of the fans.

Any beeping sounds when you turn your PC on?

EDIT: If not, check out this on Wikipedia and look at some information regarding POST tests.

It may help you find a more specific problem. (i.e. No beep - Power supply, system board problem, disconnected cpu, or disconnected speaker)

quote:

---

Originally posted by Spunky
Any beeping sounds when you turn your PC on?

---

Check my Edit btw.

When it happened to me it was my motherboard. Check all Power Supply connections, including to the CPU. Try to find a speaker and make sure it is connected.

If it was a problem with the HDDs themselves, I've got a feeling it would beep twice and show you the error.

Although, you could try removing as many devices  as possible and see if you can get to the BIOS screen. If you can, it would indeed be a piece of hardware that isn't functioning correctly and you would have to try and replace them one by one to find out which.

If there are no beeps and no BIOS startup screens, you've done something more than just mix up connections between drives and SATA ports.

Anyway, start by disconnecting all the drives, both SATA and power.  See if you at least get the BIOS screens now.  If you still don't, check all the connections you didn't intentionally touch, such as power to motherboard.  Something could have come loose while you were working inside the computer.  Reseat your graphics card and any other cards you may have.

If the above leads to success and you get video back, start reconnecting the drives one at a time.  If, after reconnecting any of the drives it stops working again, try different power connectors to the drives (in case you are overloading a single rail) and also make sure the keyed SATA connections are not stripped and you are not somehow getting it plugged in backwards.

Aside from that, you will also have to get the SATA connections (drives to ports) right before it will boot Windows, but you should be getting BIOS POST screens and beeps regardless.

The first thing I would do is try re-seating the RAM.

Ram not being seated correctly should at least produce a beep code. 2 beeps again if I remember correctly

Thanks guys, the problem was solved. Not sure what I did exactly to fix it... I kept swapping the SATA's and the power cables and reseated the GFX card. I also brought in a separate monitor, which seemed to actually work. Thanks for the help and ideas!