Please Help - power but can't boot

[I Love Beer]

Here’s what’s happening: A few days ago I found myself unable to power on my PC. Hitting the power button would flash an orange light on the front of my case but no HDD activity and no access to BIOS. At that point it wouldn’t respond to the power button and I needed to reset my surge guard to get it to shut down. After playing with it for a bit I was able to get it to boot but the date/time in the BIOS had been cleared and I needed to reset.

Figuring it was a bad battery on the MB I replaced the battery. Booted up the first time and Vista went right to Windows Error Recovery. Trying a Normal Boot and a Safe Mode Boot results in a BSOD (flashes by too quick to read) and a return to the Windows Error Recovery screen.

After getting out of that little loop I’m back to the orange light on the front of the case. I’m getting power (DVD drive will eject) but no other activity.

I’ll deal with the Vista issue once I get the hardware issue resolved. Any ideas what it might be? I thought for sure it was the battery. System has been running since June 2007 with no issues and other than the battery I replaced today I've touched nothing.

In case you're wondering:
E6420
ASUS P5B-E
2GB RAM (forget the brand)
7600GT

 

[antas]

From my experiences, it could be mainboard or PSU. If the PSU is failing, it can start to supply instable power to the system which causing system instability (BSOD) until refusing to start.

I had one experience with mobo defect with the same symptomps as yours. First I experienced many BSODs until it's refused to start (no BIOS).

However it can be another HW issues as well, step by step checking is what I can suggest:

1) try to unplug all devices (except the processor, since I don't think it's needed, not to mention we'll mess up the paste) and plug again the main devices only (PSU+mobo+memory+vga), do not attach other devices such as HDD and sound (if you have).

2) see what's the result. I may suggest also to use one memory at a time. swap different slot (but do not cross it )

3) try different PSU if you may have ...

See the result. At this point if still nothing work, then it could be the mobo defect . .

GL

 

[akhilles]

It sounds like my problem: as soon as the bios is changed, the pc won't post, but will power everything else. My solution is to shut down pc by holding the front power button, then switch psu to off, wait 1 min, switch it back on, everything will be rosy.

It only happens to me if I change the bios. Otherwise, it's biz as usual. I'm not alone in this. Other P5K owners have the same issue. It may have to do with the bios version.

Are you overclocking? If not, flash the bios back to an older stable version. Ask around for the version. This is a good place to start:

http://vip.asus.com/forum/default.aspx?SLanguage=en-us