No boot on old pc

[Yatys 93]

So I’ve been asked to try and fix my cousins sons gaming pc, it’s his old editing rig with a gpu added, the last week it’s sometimes been getting passed post, the speaker makes a constant beep and there is a very loud rattle and the screen just has a single flashing cursor, sometimes it does boot but can’t get it to today, drive originally undetected in bios changing sata port which changed it to unconfigured but no change to the above hang up, currently cloning drive to an spare ssd I had to see if that changes it, anyone got any other ideas? If the drive is now detected and still unbootable with a hangup after the splash screen, concerned it might be a board issue

[dag_dg]

First thing is to open the case and clean out any dust, make sure the fans don't have any cables bumping up against them. If you disconnect the hard drive does it act consistently? Can you get to the bios each time and get video output each boot? If you can't even get that to be consistent then it *might* be a board issue. As for the hard drive it would be a good idea to boot a Live USB of Linux or similar to check out the drive and at minimum back up the data off of the disk to be safe.

It sounds like the drive may just be dying but hard to be sure unless you eliminate other possible culprits first.

[Yatys 93]

1 hour ago, dag_dg said:

First thing is to open the case and clean out any dust, make sure the fans don't have any cables bumping up against them. If you disconnect the hard drive does it act consistently? Can you get to the bios each time and get video output each boot? If you can't even get that to be consistent then it *might* be a board issue. As for the hard drive it would be a good idea to boot a Live USB of Linux or similar to check out the drive and at minimum back up the data off of the disk to be safe.

It sounds like the drive may just be dying but hard to be sure unless you eliminate other possible culprits first.

Posted to bios every single time without fault, just won’t go past most times, case isn’t spotless but not dirty either, the only think that makes me think it’s not the drive is when I plugged it into another machine to clone it it’s working perfectly, just couldn’t get a boot out of it 

[dag_dg]

Ahhh forgot to mention double checking to make sure you don't have a bad SATA cable; try swapping cables to be safe. Also might be good to check for a bios update as well.

Hmmmm might be the board but you'd still want to eliminate other potential culprits. Typically in your position if I have a system like that I do a rebuild, completely tear it down and build it piece by piece, only booting it with the absolute minimum hardware required(1 stick of RAM, onboard graphics if you've got it, etc) and add one component at a time.

[Yatys 93]

1 hour ago, dag_dg said:

Ahhh forgot to mention double checking to make sure you don't have a bad SATA cable; try swapping cables to be safe. Also might be good to check for a bios update as well.

Hmmmm might be the board but you'd still want to eliminate other potential culprits. Typically in your position if I have a system like that I do a rebuild, completely tear it down and build it piece by piece, only booting it with the absolute minimum hardware required(1 stick of RAM, onboard graphics if you've got it, etc) and add one component at a time.

after getting the drive clone finished and putting it back in, it is now hanging on post code A3 which is "IDE Enable", so now I need to figure out how to deal with that, trying changing SATA to ACHI, no change, disabled the on board Marvell controller after some online digging, no change, tried cables, no change