What is Post & No Post?

What is 'Post' & 'No Post'?

What does 'POST' mean?

POST or Power On Self Test is the process of your system initiating and testing your system's core components before booting into the BIOS or your designated operating system when your system is first powered on.

In recent years it has become the norm to have some aspect of indicator on the motherboard to show the process and component checks in real time. This is usually in the form of a small strip of LED's on the upper-right side of the motherboard that are individually labelled by component.

They can however be located in other areas depending on the manufacturer and model of the motherboard:

CPU - Processor check

DRAM - RAM/Memory check

VGA - Graphics card and visual output check

BOOT - Bios/OS check

Should the POST process be halted or a hardware fault is discovered during the checks the sequence will fail to complete and will usually remain stuck on the problematic component or check that has failed.

It is important to note that just because your system didn't post or complete the checks, it does not always indicate a hardware fault, it could be interrupted, relate to incorrectly installed hardware, incorrect BIOS settings or a result of a power surge in which removing one of the components in the sequence, attempting to post without the component, reinstalling the component and trying again will generally reset the process and allow the system to boot correctly. 

No Post is simply when this process has failed, and you can use the beep codes, or Debug LEDs as an indicator as to why.