Hello all,
I have an old build (specs below) that I built in early 2008 and it was running fine until about April 2012. Since then, if I boot up the machine either cold or warm, I find I have to reboot or power cycle it multiple times just so that it gets through the bootup process. In most cases, it freezes just before it's supposed to display what drives I have installed. After a few attempts to boot it, it will finally show the drive list. In some cases, I don't even get the bootup beep and no picture will be displayed on my screen.
I don't have any trouble with the system once booted into Windows. Temperatures are fine also. System is not currently overclocked.
Specs:
Gigabyte P35-DS4 rev 2.1
Q6600 2.4GHz Kentsfield G0
Corsair 520HX PSU
G.Skill 4 GiB [2x2 PC2-6400 DDR2/400MHz @ 5-5-5-15]
Kingston SSD (connected to Intel SATA ports)
2 Western Digital HDDs (connected to Intel SATA ports)
Here's what I've tried to fix it:
- Tested PSU with a digital multimeter while disconnected from system, checks out ok
- Reseated CPU
- Set BIOS to fail-safe defaults
- Moved the drives around to different SATA ports (for a while, some drives would not even be detected, and this seemed to fix that)
- Removed one of the two WD HDDs (the system was fine for one day after doing this, then problems began again the next day)
- Adjusted BIOS setting "SATA RAID/AHCI Mode" (currently disabled. if enabled, Windows would BSoD while booting)
- Adjusted BIOS setting "SATA Port0-3 Native Mode" (not sure if made any difference)
- Tried Gigabyte's SATA ports instead of the Intel ones (drives were not detected by BIOS at all after doing this, but maybe I needed to adjust a BIOS setting?)
- Moved one of the SATA power cables for the HDD that I had removed to another port on the PSU since they're modular cables (system still didn't seem to boot with this drive connected, but it might not even be related to the issue since problems are still occurring.)
- Disconnected power to an IDE DVD drive in case it's an issue of not enough power being supplied to other components (incidentally, my machine stopped detecting the drive sometime earlier this year)
Here's what I have not tried:
- Changing the CMOS battery
- Trying another PSU
- Updating BIOS (troublesome since the BIOS flash utility doesn't recognize a USB drive, but might work with a media card)
- Testing RAM (Last tested with memtest in April 2012 when problems began, and all showed ok. System works ok in Windows, so I haven't tried this again)
Any help appreciated.
I have an old build (specs below) that I built in early 2008 and it was running fine until about April 2012. Since then, if I boot up the machine either cold or warm, I find I have to reboot or power cycle it multiple times just so that it gets through the bootup process. In most cases, it freezes just before it's supposed to display what drives I have installed. After a few attempts to boot it, it will finally show the drive list. In some cases, I don't even get the bootup beep and no picture will be displayed on my screen.
I don't have any trouble with the system once booted into Windows. Temperatures are fine also. System is not currently overclocked.
Specs:
Gigabyte P35-DS4 rev 2.1
Q6600 2.4GHz Kentsfield G0
Corsair 520HX PSU
G.Skill 4 GiB [2x2 PC2-6400 DDR2/400MHz @ 5-5-5-15]
Kingston SSD (connected to Intel SATA ports)
2 Western Digital HDDs (connected to Intel SATA ports)
Here's what I've tried to fix it:
- Tested PSU with a digital multimeter while disconnected from system, checks out ok
- Reseated CPU
- Set BIOS to fail-safe defaults
- Moved the drives around to different SATA ports (for a while, some drives would not even be detected, and this seemed to fix that)
- Removed one of the two WD HDDs (the system was fine for one day after doing this, then problems began again the next day)
- Adjusted BIOS setting "SATA RAID/AHCI Mode" (currently disabled. if enabled, Windows would BSoD while booting)
- Adjusted BIOS setting "SATA Port0-3 Native Mode" (not sure if made any difference)
- Tried Gigabyte's SATA ports instead of the Intel ones (drives were not detected by BIOS at all after doing this, but maybe I needed to adjust a BIOS setting?)
- Moved one of the SATA power cables for the HDD that I had removed to another port on the PSU since they're modular cables (system still didn't seem to boot with this drive connected, but it might not even be related to the issue since problems are still occurring.)
- Disconnected power to an IDE DVD drive in case it's an issue of not enough power being supplied to other components (incidentally, my machine stopped detecting the drive sometime earlier this year)
Here's what I have not tried:
- Changing the CMOS battery
- Trying another PSU
- Updating BIOS (troublesome since the BIOS flash utility doesn't recognize a USB drive, but might work with a media card)
- Testing RAM (Last tested with memtest in April 2012 when problems began, and all showed ok. System works ok in Windows, so I haven't tried this again)
Any help appreciated.
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