I'm currently trying to diagnose the fault in a computer that refuses to boot. Yesterday it kept resetting after about half an hours use and so I looked at temperatures. Nothing was out of the ordinary and also the temperature probes in the machine were showing normal readings. This system is over a year old and has been stable for the whole time I've had it so I'm very familiar with what everything should show.
Then I was thinking a software fault in the operating system but before I got round to running a system restore in xp the problem got worse. Upon restarting itself the machine wouldn't load windows. It got to the screen that displays the xp logo and the scrolling blue loading bar but then froze about 20 seconds later.
Now it won't even get that far, the monitor displays nothing when you power it on. Figuring it has to be a harware fault I've had a look around. Cables and coolers are all seated properly and nothing appears to have changed. The fans all start and I can hear the hard disks operating. As display seemed to be the problem I switched in another graphics card but no change (also tried alternate monitors but again no luck). Basically I'm down to thinking it's the motherboard that's broken, or more likely (I hope) that the hard disk boot sector has somehow become corrupted. I doubt it's the whole hard disk that's dead as I can hear operating type noises but I guess it could be totally dead.
Before I go and buy a new hard disk can anyone think of anything else I could do to determine the problem?