Any PC gurus in the room??? HELP!

[Asso_man!]

Guys, I have a serious computer problem: a friend of mine came to visit me yesterday with a portable hard drive and wanted to upload some movies on my PC. I have a Dell Dimension 4600 with Pentium 4, 80GB hard drive and Windows XP. As my hard drive was already half full/empty (depending of the point of view, lol), it was actually full in the middle of the uploading process. I stopped the procedure, turned off the computer and when I tried to turn it on this morning on the tower, instead of the usual still green light I had on orange one blinking and nothing on the screen. I turned it off again and then BAM, nothing, even the orange light doesn't blink anymore. I know that because of the full disk there is probably not enough virtual/temporary memory left to even turn the computer on, but the PC should at least do something and it just looks like it's dead. I don't have any back-up and there are thousands of personal pictures and important documents on it Do I have to take off the hard drive, connect it as a slave on another computer running with XP and just delete the files that caused this mess? If this is the case, what's the hardware/cables needed, is there a particular procedure to follow? I'm really busted

[fordtransman]

Power supply or Motherboard.

\Power spike somehow during shutdown?. Flashing orange is typically board power low. Until the screen reads the "Windows XP", etc... Logo, you are only running the BIOS on the Motherboard. The BIOS tells the motherboard when to run the HD. If the computer tried to turn on, I would suggest going into the BIOS (F8, or F12) and reset defaults, but I don't think you are even getting that far.

Check out this article.... It gives some insight on a solution. As you already wrote, I would unplug the harddrive, and install it to another pc in place of the harddrive already installed to check it/verify. If the computer doesn't even power on, it has nothing to do with the HD.
Note the last forum comments in the link. At that point you can research replacement of the MB, or contact Dell for further assistance.

http://www.techimo.com/forum/technical-support/185730-dell-blinking-amber-light-no-boot.html

I have an external HD for backup just for these reasons. I have copies of everything, on 3 units. I unplug the external HD when I am doing a backup. It just sits on the shelf, next to my 12L

Never trust anything you can't directly control

Good luck!
Gregg

[fordtransman]

It could also just be a coincidence that the internal power supply burnt out.... there several field ways to verify it, such as looking for the right voltages on the lines inside that are not being used, etc.....

Go over the article, one fellow had a similar problem, the supply fixed it, the main fellow it didn't
I replaced ONE power supply in my time it was a 4 year old eMachines unit.

Gregg