Need help my PC won't boot up

[DarkKnightCecil]

Ok, here's the problem. Last night I go to boot up my PC...and nothing happens. Then after a few minutes I hear the Hard drive spin but it never boots up. Its like when you first turn on your computer and the Hard drive spins, then the system boots...well, it never gets beyond the first part.

Monitor light is amber
Hard drive spins for about 2 seconds green light then nothing
pause
Hard drive spins for about 2 seconds green light then nothing
pause

Monday night I did two things different than normal.
1) I added an external DVD burner which worked fine before my last shutdown
2) We were having really bad electrical storms so I unplugged my power strip from the wall. (it has a surge protector in it but its not the best so I figured better safe than sorry)

The only other thing I can think of is about 3 weeks ago I uninstalled Daemon tools (which I used to created a virtual drive which was drive F...and now my external DVD burner is drive F) Perhaps its creating a conflict? The only thing is I don't think that would interfere with a startup but I've been wrong before.

Now, I tried the obvious things first.
I disconnected and reconnected all the cables.
I disconnected the new DVD burner and tried to startup
I checked the power strip.
I opened her up and made sure all the plugs were snugly in place.
I made sure the boards and memory sticks were all snug.
I smelled for the "burnt metal" smell of a spent power supply.

Everything seemed to be ok but still no go.

Here is the basics:
Dimension 4600
2.6 ghz Pen 4
Win XP
1 gig RAM
80 gig HD
1 DVD ROM drive
1 CD-RW drive
1 External DVD burner
128MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Graphics Card

Now, to me I think it may be the power supply. I really don't want to take it somewhere to be repaired because there is quite alot of "aquired" software on board. On the same token, I hope its not my HD because it was really hard to get some of the things that are on my drive. Ironically, one of the reasons I bought the DVD burner was so I could start to backup my irreplaceable files.


Any help would be appreciated.

Oh and in case anyone is wondering, I am writing this from work...its my home PC thats fd.

[Duality]

Try removing all of your peripheral devices. This includes all hard/removable media drives, as well as your video card.

If it powers up, but doesn't emit any beeps, then I'd wager a guess of the motherboard being shot. If it were the power supply (or, by extention the power strip), the CPU, or the memory, it likely would not even power up.

Do you have any other systems you can pull a motherboard/cpu/memory from and test in your machine? You won't need to worry about trying to boot into Windows if you do this, as the problem is certainly hardware related. As long as the computer POSTs, its okay.

[DarkKnightCecil]

Try removing all of your peripheral devices. This includes all hard/removable media drives, as well as your video card.

If it powers up, but doesn't emit any beeps, then I'd wager a guess of the motherboard being shot. If it were the power supply (or, by extention the power strip), the CPU, or the memory, it likely would not even power up.

Do you have any other systems you can pull a motherboard/cpu/memory from and test in your machine? You won't need to worry about trying to boot into Windows if you do this, as the problem is certainly hardware related. As long as the computer POSTs, its okay.

Thanks, I'll give that a try this evening. It sucks...hardware is not my specialty. If something goes wrong on the software end, I can usually sniff it out. Hardware...well...

Unfortunately, I sold my 2 older computers when I bought this new one about a year ago, so I have no parts to pull from. I'm going to see if I can swap some stuff from work.