Comp turns on, freezes at mobo screen. What's up? *fixed*

[Chris2]

I was playing Mame last night on my box of doom, and I left it on, figuring that nothing would really happen to it if it'd been on for longer than a night before. When I went down to play it today, the system was on, but there was no video or audio output, and none of the controls (or mouse and keyboard) would respond. I turned it off and back on, and now it's stuck at the motherboard's boot-up screen, before the hard drive is initialized and the OS starts running. Why doesn't the OS load? Could the HDD be unresponsive? If so, what should I do? Mind you that everything was just fine last night.

never mind. It's fine now.

[fatfingers]

Can you get into the BIOS setup screen?

[brock.sampson]

Do you hear any beeps when you power up?  If so write down the sequence and look up the beep codes for your particular motherboard.  Also try and disconnect/remove everything that is not essential cd rom, hdd, nic, etc.  If it boots add one thing back at a time and see where it hangs.

[Thenasty]

RAM

[DaveMMR]

Make sure everything is seated properly in the motherboard (RAM, cards, cables).   But as everyone else asked, if you have any specific beeps, messages, etc. let us know so you get more specific answers.

[Todd H]

Lots of good advice. As others have said, it could be a number of things. Heck, I had a computer do that a few years ago. After replacing just about everything trying to fix the problem, I noticed that a good six caps on the motherboard were bulging. Start small before doing any major replacing of components.

[ark_ader]

RAM, PSU, CPU (Heat Issue), Not a Mac....