I was operating Itunes on my DELL Desk Top when all the sudden the screen went black and the music stopped.  I rebooted the computer and it looked as if it reboots but I cant tell because nothing is on the screen.  The green hard drive LIGHTS appeared to be flickering as it normally does but nothing is showing on the monitor.  The monitor appears to still work with it's power light on but no input is coming from the computer.  I don't think it is the monitor because the music stopped when the incident happened. I don't know if this is a hard drive failure or something to do with a power failure from inside the desk top.  any ideas of what would the problem be?  Of course a computer shop will charge me $120 to just look at it.  The Desk top is 7 years old and i guess i have to buy a new one but I need my data from the hard drive.
Any suggestions is appreciated!  Thank you!!!When you reboot the computer, does it show anything at all on the screen?
Does the bios version appear?

If you can find another monitor to swap in there temporarily and it works, you can rule out the computer itself being the problem.


Also, post the make/model of the computer..Thank you for the reply!!

I havent TRIED a new monitor yet.  I figured since the sound went out too, the problem is beyond monitor.
After I reboot it, I can see the power lights and hard drive active lights on the tower working normally, the keyboard lights work as well but nothing coming on the monitor at all.  I have a 17" viewsonic monitor and it displays a message saying no signal detected.  No sound during rebooting either.  I'm scratching my head on this one!  I'm hoping that the problem is not hard drive failure since I don't have all my data backed up

The computer is: DELL DIMENSION 4550 bought in 2003

Thanx!Another thing we can try is booting off of your Windows XP installation disc..
If you can see information on the screen when booting off the disc, then that means your monitor is ok, and you can proceed to troubleshooting other components.

Most systems, by default, are set to boot from the optical drive, so if you place your installation disc into the computer and restart it should boot off the disc..

In the mean time, you may want to take your hard drive out and add it as a slave drive to another computer... Boot up the computer and copy your important files from the hard drive over to a thumb drive or something..

Quick tutorial on "slaving" a hard drive..

http://freepctech.com/pc/001/installing_ide_devices.shtml
From your SECOND post:

Quote from: shark1080 on February 21, 2010, 02:44:44 PM

nothing coming on the monitor at all. 

From your second post:

I don't know why it didn't hit me the first time I read this..  If you see nothing on the monitor, then you first need to try another monitor...  If the bios version, at least, is not showing up, then that has nothing to do with your hard drive...  Either the monitor is broke, or your onboard video/card, or other motherboard component has gone out...

It could also be the monitor cable...

Or, the power supply.

maybe try a new graphics card. sometimes after so much use the graphics card get bad memory (craps out). There is no way to fix the card, but just to replace it.