 original message from aherne peter pahernNUMBER mailto peter aherne motorola com sent NUMBER august NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER to ilug URL subject ilug ot dell machine giving me hassle ok iknow this is blatantly ot but i m beginning to go insane had an old dell dimension xps sitting in the corner and decided to put it to use i know it was working pre being stuck in the corner but when i plugged it in hit the power nothing happened i opened her up and had a look and say nothing much a little orange led comes on when i plug her in but that s it after some googling i found some reference to re seating all the parts but no change the problem i m having is that since the power supply is some dell specific one atx block with what looks like one of the old at power connectors i cant figure out weather this is a mobo prob or a psu prob just to futily try and drag this back ot i want to install linux on it when i get it working if anyone knows what the problem might be give me a shout here is what you do remove all the pci isa eisa cards remove the floppy disk cable from the mobo the ide cables from the mobo essentially leaving only a video card ram and a keyboard plugged in turn on the system if it doesn t post then switch it off and remove the video card switch it back on if your mobo doesn t emit some beeps complaining about lack of video card then switch it off remove it s ram same procedure as above if you still don t have any kind of mobo beep codes then you can try as a last ditch effort to reseat the cpu remembering to never ever ever power up your system without a heatsink fan if after reseating the cpu into the mobo you still get no beep codes from it with just the cpu inserted into the mobo ie no pci isa cards or and no actual ide or floppy cables connected to the system even though you have power you either have a faulty motherboard or a faulty cpu once you get beep codes various permutations of the above should eventually disjunct which device it is is causing the lack of post power on self test bod irish linux users group ilug URL URL for un subscription information list maintainer listmaster URL 