PC fails to boot after acting up for a while

[mon4ro]

I built a PC with a friend a year ago. It was for him he hand-picked the parts himself. The computer has worked totally fine for 11 months until in the beginning of the month it would refuse to boot up sometimes. This would be resolved by rebooting a few times and the PC would work just fine from then on.

Last week the PC wouldn't boot up at all anymore. My first instinct was that his very old screen was breaking down as my friend is not the tech-savviest guy in the world and I had had a similar problem with my monitor that it would lose signal when turned on.

Yesterday I went to my friend's place to see what's up. We tried two different cables (HDMI and DVI-VGA) and two different monitors but that didn't help. I opened her up and tried figuring out if something was wrong inside. All the fans were working normally, all lights and buttons on the MOBO were working - these included MOBO stand-by light, faulty RAM LED, BIOS button that was supposed to boot the computer straight to BIOS or shut down the PC when it was running. Obviously only the latter one worked. There was never any signal on the monitor: no splashscreen or anything. Also there may have been a post beep earlier but now there was no such thing to be heard.

I tried booting with only one stick of RAM and changed the power cable on the GPU. Unfortunately the MOBO is so low-budget that it doesn't have any video output, with which I could've ruled out a faulty GPU.

Now this is where I run out of ammo. I have no idea how to continue troubleshooting. To me it seems that pretty much anything could be broken: MOBO, CPU, GPU. Probably not RAM since the faulty RAM LED wasn't blinking for a faulty RAM.

My friend was also concerned that since he has a pirated Windows 7 that could be the cause for no booting. But I don't really see any way how that could work. And I have never heard that something like that could be possible.

There is a theoretical possibility that I could try my own GPU if it starts working with that but it is a big hassle. How to proceed? Any ideas what might be wrong? Obviously he can't just buy all new PC and expert's help costs a lot.

Apologies for the low-res pic of the part list.
http://gyazo.com/6a4432a49b5ec9cfbdf18438bd7f2226

Thank you in advance!
-mon4ro

 

[p_nut_uk]

What happens on boot up? Does it loop back? If so where? It's very possible that it's software related. Given it's only 1 year old it's unlikely the hard drive but not out of the realms of possibility.

 

[smorizio]

if the power supply went bad you can lose a leg and still have parts turn on. the cx line is not the best units for a gaming pc. i would see if he has a test power supply or if you have to if you have a local micro center...pick up a new unit for testing then return it if it does not work. if he has or a friend has a volt meter you can check the voltage of the power supply. on asus mb if the gpu failed the fault led would be on.

 

[mon4ro]

What happens on boot up? Does it loop back? If so where? It's very possible that it's software related. Given it's only 1 year old it's unlikely the hard drive but not out of the realms of possibility.

The PC boots up but nothing happens. It's as if everything was fine but there is just no signal on the monitor. Can the cracked Windows do such a thing? I could try booting Ubuntu from a USB stick or something.

 

[mon4ro]

if the power supply went bad you can lose a leg and still have parts turn on. the cx line is not the best units for a gaming pc. i would see if he has a test power supply or if you have to if you have a local micro center...pick up a new unit for testing then return it if it does not work. if he has or a friend has a volt meter you can check the voltage of the power supply. on asus mb if the gpu failed the fault led would be on.

Thanks for the advice, I'll see what I can do!

 

[mon4ro]

Last week we tried another power supply. Everything went great, we were really happy and maybe started celebrating too early. Today my friend bought a new supply. We plugged everything and booted her up. We got straight to BIOS with post beep and all. We booted from HDD and we were prompted whether to run Windows recovery. We didn't and the starting screen came on. However, the PC crashed when the colorful dots of the Windows logo started swirling around above the text "starting Windows" and the PC rebooted itself. Now we ran recovery. It took quite a while but when it was done we restarted the PC. The same crashing would occur every time. We tried rebooting 10-20 times with the same problem every time. We decided to have a break and grab a bite.

After an hour so we came back. The PC wouldn't boot. No beep, no nothing. We tried again. Now Windows started starting up but crashed again. Reboot, nothing, reboot, Windows started and crashed again. Reboot, nothing, reboot, nothing, reboot - nothing. We were back in square one - rather flabbergasted too. The booting up thing seemed to have been resolved but no.

My friend wasted 80 € and now we have two problems instead of one. What to do, guys?

Thanks in advance!
mon4ro