Question OS boot failed, now pc turns off immediately

Hi,
I put a Linux Mint 19.1 live cd into my pc, and started it, but it got stuck at the logo with the green dots that should progress until it starts. After leaving it for time with no activity, I decided to turn the pc off then back on again. Now the whole pc fails to even get to POST; I press the power button, the CPU fan goes and I can hear the disk drive spin, but within a second, it turns itself off again. It is not a RAM problem, nor GPU or HDD, and I don't think it's PSU either. The weird thing is, it was working with Windows 10 earlier today... This problem occurs even after clearing CMOS. I will have to wait a few hours before I can swap the PSU to test that... In the meantime, has anyone got other ideas? I find it odd that it coincided with the Linux Mint failing to boot.
M2N VM/s MoBo
Athlon 64 x2 5000+
Nanya DDR2 800MHz 1GB x4
(Other ram also tested)
One of them cheap Zoostorm OEM PSUs that, actually, might be the problem but it's just odd that it froze and not turned off if it is the problem.
Nvidia 8400gs
Cheers
Conan
 

Lutfij

Titan
Moderator
How old is your PSU? The name in itself doesn't give much confidence in terms of reliability. Often times a failing PSU can exhibit what you've mentioned. You might want to see if a spare blank storage drive with a clean install of an OS of your choosing changes your current experience.
 
How old is your PSU? The name in itself doesn't give much confidence in terms of reliability. Often times a failing PSU can exhibit what you've mentioned. You might want to see if a spare blank storage drive with a clean install of an OS of your choosing changes your current experience.
Thanks for the quick reply. I'm not sure the age of the PSU, but yes, it is one of them 'russian roulette' ones. I have already tried two different hard drives, as well as none at all. I've never had a PSU failure before, which is why I wasn't sure as to whether the fact that it powered up a little bit was an indicator of this or not. I will try a spare one soon to see if it is any different
 
Is it possible that a hard drive might have cause this. I got a 250 GB one for a different PC, quite an old one, which wasn't recognised and I couldn't find it in the BIOS (no SATA options, only IDE). I was going to install Linux Mint onto it. I moved it onto my Windows 10 PC (the one which now doesn't boot), took the old HDD out, and booted the Mint CD. Then as I said in the OP, Linux failed to boot and I am now stuck with a PC which turns off immediately. I have swapped the old HDD back in, to no avail. As I said, I will try another PSU, but is there any possibility that the hard drive may have caused this whole thing?
 
It is very unlikely tha HDD is the direct reason behind the failure.

However the HDD does require more power to start spinning, and therefore someone may draw the wrong conclusion and think the hdd is faulty because more HDD's installed increase the risk of tripping an already bad PSU into temorarly failure.
 
An OS itself doesn't destroy a mainboard.

Thing is that there may be bad capacitors still - there is not all of them that blow off when failure.

The CPU I beleive was released back in 2008 so it make your system about 10 years old. My experience after having built some computers is that I can expect the motherboards last between 7 and 12 years. MB for servers or business models tend to last longer.