Weird startup problem

[Yeekim]

I have about a year and a half old computer which has recently developed a strange startup problem.
When I push the power button, the power light comes on and the fan starts, but the hard drive light remains dead, and no "beep" which usually signals it has started to boot up, can be heard.
It took me five tries last time, to get the system boot properly.

And no, it is not the problem with monitor.

What do you think, could this be a bad connection somewhere (and could I possibly fix it myself) or is some crucial part just about to die?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

If it doesn't startup at all I'd suspect a mobo failure. But it seems it does startup after a while for you?

 

[Yeekim]

If it doesn't startup at all I'd suspect a mobo failure. But it seems it does startup after a while for you?

As I said, it took me five tries this time.
(I had to turn it off by holding down power button and then simply tried again).

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Fans start up and lights turn on?

Do you know if the fans are connected to the motherboard or directly to the PSU? If they're connected to the motherboard, it means there is at least some juice flowing through it, and its most likely not the motherboard.

Does the monitor show anything when it turns on?

Another thing to check is to see if the CPU cooler fan turns on, as well as the video card if its got one. If those are working, there should be power flowing to the connectors as well.

Go ahead and open up the case, check all connections, dust out the thing and reset CMOS. If the problem persists even then, you've got cause for worry, otherwise, a weird glitch.

 

[illram]

Bad RAM? When it's on and working does it randomly shut down for no reason? I've had two computers do something kind of similar and it wound up being the RAM.

 

[kcwong]

Try removing components from MB. Remove hard drives, disk/disc drives, etc. Leave only RAM and video card. Then start your computer and see if it can get past BIOS (it will then prompt you to insert boot media).

I had a bad hard disk (a Seagate S-ATA) causing a similar problem: surface scan on that disk revealed no problem, but Windows took astronomical amount of time to boot (after BIOS it took minutes for loading bar to appear, then at least 5 minutes before you can login), and remains running very slowly after login, but would recover and work at full speed a long time later. I connected that disk to another computer and the same slowdown happened.