Minimum Equipment for a Computer to Boot?

[warhammer3025]

An extremely basic hardware question: what is the absolute minimum equipment needed to get a PC to boot to the BIOS? Does it need RAM installed? A CPU? Hard drive?

 

[Motopsychojdn]

Motherboard, chip and ram will give you a post into bios
You could have linux on a usb drive as the Os, if you wanted to
Moto

 

[HugoStiglitz]

Mobo
CPU
RAM
PSU

this will give you POST and the ability to program BIOS (with the aid of a keyboard)

 

[Motopsychojdn]

Hehe, psu, good catch hugo 🙂
Moto

 

[willard]

You should also probably have a keyboard so you can interact with the computer in some way. Staring at the screen telling you that it can't find a boot disk sounds like loads of fun, but probably isn't terribly useful.

 

[aaab]

Umm you will need a video card of some sort if you don't have onboard lol. Kinda hard to see the bios otherwise.

 

[warhammer3025]

Thanks. One motherboard I had (a while ago, admittedly) had problems when I installed memory to all 4 RAM slots. Turned out the voltages were somehow set wrong in the BIOS; was wondering if I could get to the BIOS without installing RAM to make sure all the settings were correct before putting in the sticks.

 

[aaab]

You will need to reset your BIOS. Usually there is a jumper on your motherboard that will reset the BIOS to defaults

Or you can pull out the battery and leave it for a few hours.

 

[Motopsychojdn]

No, you cannot post without ram
Moto

 

[warhammer3025]

Best answer selected by warhammer3025.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey