Is my hardware dead?

codybadger

Hi,

Last year, I built a pfsense router box out of an old dell machine I had. It worked well for me over the last year. The other night, I was playing a video game online, and I lost my connection. It seemed like my internet was down. I went on my phone to see if our ISP had an outage - I couldn't quite tell. It seemed like there were maybe a few reports of it being down, but the websites I was looking at also looked very scammy.

The next morning, the internet was still down. I restarted the modem, and then the pfsense router. Plugging directly from the modem into my laptop, I had internet access. Nothing was coming out of my pfsense router. I couldn't access my dashboard either (by going to my router's IP address in my browser.)

I set up a backup router for the time being, and brought my pfsense box down to my workshop. I tried hooking it up to my monitor (HDMI) to see what was happening on the console, but the monitor isn't recognizing any input.

I made a 2.5.2 installation usb stick, plugged it in, booted up, and pushed esc, f1, f2, f10, and f12 during startup, and again nothing.

It seems like I have a brick on my hands, but I haven't seen any other posts about this kind of issue. Is my hardware toast? I'm not that great at this stuff, so figured I'd come here and see if anyone could give me any tips to try.

Gertjan

@codybadger

It's a classic PC, right ? with some extra NIC's.
If nothing shows up during boot, well, yeah, the issue is not the OS, as the PC doesn't reach the phase were it boot the PC. The BIOS should come up first, ... and isn't there neither.
The PC is probably good for a retirement.

JKnott

@codybadger

Well, computers fail. That happened to me last year. What I noticed was a slow connection. When I rebooted, it wouldn't come up. I had originally used that computer for a Linux firewall and I tried to install Linux on it and couldn't even do that. I replaced it with the computer described in my sig.

stephenw10

Yeah, sounds like a hardware failure. It might be a replacable component though. I would start removing everything you can remove, checking at each item.
You generally need the CPU and some RAM to see the POST but everything else can be removed.

Steve

codybadger

@gertjan yeah, it's a classic PC. i don't see anything on the monitor/console when booting up.

@JKnott i'm thinking i'll pick up a smaller form factor unit like what you're running, or something similar.

thanks all for the responses - it's helpful.