computer not posting regularly

roxy23

Honorable
Oct 23, 2013
4
0
10,510
can a faulty hard drive cause my pc to not post regularly, what happens is i'll push the power button and nothing happens on the screen, but the fans run and no beeps, i'll leave it for 5-10 minutes and then restart my pc and viola. off it goes kinda like a warm up, could it be my hard drive?


specs; amd phenom ii x2 550
asus m2n32 sli deluxe
seagate 320 gb hdd
nvidia gt 640 gpu
4gb ram
silverstone 500w power supply
windows 7 ultimate os
 
Solution
The only "easy" tests to do with a power supply just check to see if its flat out dead, which yours isn't or it wouldn't ever boot. They make volt meters you could check to see exactly what is coming out but honestly I would unplug my Hard drive, see if that fixes it, run memtest to see if the memory has gone bad. and if its neither of those that leaves you with a bad power supply or as smorz said possibly a bad motherboard, neither of these are very easy to check which is why I suggest the first two first. You can look at voltages with a program called HWinfo, or look at them in bios, but they won't show you what is going on when its not posting as you have to get past the post in order to use either of these and likely won't show you...

Supahos

Expert
Ambassador
Most likely coulprit is your power supply failing, (could be a hard drive too, unplug it and see if it posts as soon as its unplugged). Last suggestion i have is run memtest to see if your memory is possibly bad. Usually it results in blue screens or lockups instead of post fails but stranger things have happened.
 

roxy23

Honorable
Oct 23, 2013
4
0
10,510


so you think it could be the power supply? cause it does switch on after a while is there a program i can use to check how many watts my computer is using or something to check my power supply? how do i check that?
 

Supahos

Expert
Ambassador
The only "easy" tests to do with a power supply just check to see if its flat out dead, which yours isn't or it wouldn't ever boot. They make volt meters you could check to see exactly what is coming out but honestly I would unplug my Hard drive, see if that fixes it, run memtest to see if the memory has gone bad. and if its neither of those that leaves you with a bad power supply or as smorz said possibly a bad motherboard, neither of these are very easy to check which is why I suggest the first two first. You can look at voltages with a program called HWinfo, or look at them in bios, but they won't show you what is going on when its not posting as you have to get past the post in order to use either of these and likely won't show you the issue.
 
Solution