Dell Desktop hybernates; won't reboot

[Chuckleberry]

My Dell Dimension 2350 has a mystifying problem of shutting down its the hard drive and not rebooting. After troubleshooting for several hours last night, it "miraculously" came back to life on its own and ran fine (all programs o.k., screensaver activated o.k. w/quick resume). Then sometime this afternoon it died again.

We started having problems weeks ago when it would seemingly go into deep hibernation, despite none of the Powersaving settings being selected. I read somewhere that leaving Firefox, "a known memory leaker," open could cause this. I'm bad about doing just that, so the next time I was able to wake the computer up, I made a point of closing out Firefox and it seemed to do better for a few days...i.e. no default hibernation. But now this! Currently I am completely dead (sending this post from a laptop). When I power on the power LED lights up and then the "accessing-hard-disc LED lights for just a few seconds .... then nothing. The power light on the monitor altenates between yellow and green, but mostly yellow, and the screen occassionally flickers.

Any ideas out there?

[jbennet]

vista or xp?

[Chuckleberry]

It's XP.

[Chuckleberry]

Also, I inserted the original Microsoft XP Setup CD into the CD-ROM drive, assuming it would contain boot files. If the CMOS is set up correctly, the system is supposed look there after failing to boot from the hard drive, right? Well, either the CD does not have boot files, or something else is going wrong, as that didn't work either.

[jbennet]

You need to hit f11 or something and choose CDROM

thats what i have to do on my dell e510

[Chuckleberry]

Tried the F11 idea, and also F12 which I read somewhere would take me to the bios, but still no luck. I'm still getting absolutely nothing on the monitor, except "no signal" whenever I power down.