compaq 5100 ws wont boot

[iain]

i ahve just bough a 2nd hand dual P" compaq workstation, i tried tesing it - with no hard drive to see if it works.

there is no monitor ouput, i checked the pci/isa bus card and it is seated correctly. moved the cga card to another pci card and repeated this witha different card, still nothing.

There is also no post beep, i checked the motherboard power supply and it connected ok, the fan starts and the cdrom accepts disks and ekects them so its not apower issue.

please advise me any other possible causes,
thanks

[golfinguy4]

Is the motherboard ok? How about the proc?

[TravisS]

Generally compaq's don't have onboard speakers, so you don't hear a post beep even if everything tests out OK. That makes troubleshooting a Compaq a HUGE pain in the ass.

Try putting a bootable floppy in the floppy drive. Power up the computer, and just kinda watch it for a few minutes. If it starts to access the drive as though it's actually reading from it (not just the initial power on drive check) then the motherboard is OK. If it doesn't start reading from the drive, something is definately wrong.

[mart_man00]

i had a old compaq prolinea and its bios was all screwup. i could actually get into the setup so i cheater, i yanked the battery for a while. mine had a sheet of all the jumper inside(written by compaq right on the inside of the case), so i just followed that.

then i finallu saw errors, but atleast i had video. have fun with the old harddrives, theres a million of them!

[Tommaso]

Try exchanging the ram with stuff that you know works. If it still does not work, put back the old ram and replace the video card with one that you know works. If it still does not work, try disconnecting all drives, and turning it on. Still if nothing appears on the screen I would say you have some serious problems. Could be the board, or the processor. Replace everything one at a time seperately, and you should find your problem. Unfortunately to do all this you need some old equipment hanging around. May be a friend has some old video cards and mem laying around. I own a computer repair shop, and always cringe when I see a compaq come in. There just weird. Anyways, good luck.