Occasional Ramblings

Last night i returned home to find we had a family crisis, my Son's PC was failing to boot up. The problem had started earlier when the PC failed along with a lot of other things, including the iron which was being used at the time. Something had tripped a switch which deals with the house electrical sockets. The iron was the number one suspect. But when the PC was switched on again the fan worked for about four seconds and then the computer shut down.

My Son and i had a look inside but could find nothing that had burned out (  by the way, we know very little about the insides of a PC ). Firstly my Son removed the hard drive, with the intention of trying it in the extra bay in my PC to see if the fault was with the drive and if possible to copy his data over. The graphics card was next to be taken out to see if the fault was with it. The modem card was removed and still the problem persisted - we were doing all this having decided by now that as it wasn't working we wouldn't be making things worse. With both of these cards out the PC still wouldn't boot and so we assumed they were not faulty.

As he was removing the case from my PC i decided to take out the battery for the clock/CMOS. When i turned the computer on after doing this it stayed on, which confused us somewhat. Why should that make a difference?

We then replaced the graphics card to see if anything would appear on the monitor, which it did. We were then able to access BIOS. The hard drive was then re-installed but when the PC was started it failed to detect it. So had we achieved anything?

I remembered i had a spare battery, so put this in, restarted and checked the BIOS, it was now able to remember stuff, but the hard drive remained a problem.  Thinking the connections were not in properly we pushed and pulled and rocked the two connections but none of this helped.

I had suggested a few times that we should maybe try one of the spare power connections but my Son pointed out that as the floppy, etc. was working that the hard drive was probably getting power. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour but it was only after he had said this to me for the third time that i said it must be the other ( grey ) 'cable' - i say cable but it is more like a flat grey strap. Anyway he had a spare new one so we swapped them over and with trepidation turned on the PC, and it worked as it should. We had no idea that a small 'clock' battery could cause a computer to fail so completely but it becomes a bit clearer if you go to // http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question319.htm