UPDATEA bit late, but thanks all the same for the assurance guys - all went well, got his hard drive into my machine and it spun up fine - I copied everything over to an external hard drive...
...returning his hard drive to his machine still resulted in nothing - so I've been making my apologies & excuses not to lose a day to hardware troubleshooting - and told him to use the house-share laptop for now; he's only a web surfer and iTunes fiddler so it should have done him fine, now that his music collection was on the external hard drive....
...Or at least it was until last night when he kicked it over (he's a messy, scatty fool) and killed the thing - we've had the hard drive (from the external) out and into my machine and it's dead - and somehow he managed to kill the enclosure as well (which means we can't even put his computer's working hard drive to some use in the interim!)
...and so, external drive fiasco & all, I find myself once more facing the prospect of having to troubleshoot a dead computer.... Well when I say dead, it's not entirely dead - the fans, case LED's and mobo power LED all work (and I was thinking it'd be a simple PSU failure & a quick n' easy switcheroo
) - so where to begin?
Start with the memory? Test one stick at a time? If that doesn't work should / can I swap my ram in (we're both DDR) to see if that works?
Fortunately he's running a 3800, me a 4000; do I test my CPU in his machine or his CPU in my machine?
Unfortunately his mobo has neither integrated graphics nor a PCIe slot so I can't test my 7800GTX in his machine, nor his 6800LE on my non-AGP mobo...
And I've not a clue how to even think about testing a mobo to see if it's dead....
Some (more) help / advice would be greatly appreciated.
