Tonight I was firing up a virtual machine when the physical computer suddenly froze one screen, switched to mostly black on the other, power-cycled itself, and refused to boot. The hard drive is active for a little while, then all activity ceases; the monitors report "no signal" and no beeps are emitted. I tried various things for no improvement: rebooting again, holding down the power button with no power connected, inserting a bootable USB, and reseating the RAM.
I'm pretty sure the RAM is fine, since there are no beeps. The hard drives are probably OK as well; even if the OS one had completely died while the system was up, it should have shown a bugcheck upon detection or an error upon rebooting. There does not appear to be any physical damage to any components. Currently I suspect a failed graphics card or CPU. Alas, I have no VGA cable to test the integrated graphics, but the graphical artifacts shown on-screen at the first failure make me suspicious of the GPU. I'm concerned about the CPU because the computer seemed to feel slower as of late, though that might just be my getting used to the speed.
My next thing to try is to gently remove the graphics card to see if the boot process will continue with only the integrated graphics. I won't be able to see anything for lack of an appropriate cable, but I'll be able to tell from the hard drive activity. If the problem persists, the CPU is probably at fault. In any case, I'll be sharper at investigating things in the morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment