10 mins to boot... and still fails.

Woke up to find my computer messed up today... whats happening if whenever the computer is turned on the mobo booting process takes literally 10 or more minutes to go anywhere including bios.

To make matters worse it fails to even start booting windows it always gives one of three errors.

1: checksum error

2: Fails to find the operating system installed

3: fails to find it and fails to find the harddrive and try's to go forth via cd-rom.

I've tried resetting the CMOS battery, taking every piece of hardware out except the CPU, swapped ram sticks slots and tried each ram stick by itself, swapped harddrives... nothing worked.

Now I'm sure the checksum error has to do with the CMOS but that wouldn't explain my other problems. My biggest fear is that my mobo itself is the problem. I really like this mobo and wold hate to have to put it to sleep and send it to hardware heaven where system requirements don't exist and everything is compatible..

My specs are

p35-ds3l
E4300 OC to 3GHZ
256mb Radeon 3850
2X 1GB DDR2 Mushkin 6400

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

First unplug any USB etc. peripherals and boot. Next unplug any cards installed, except the VGA of course, and boot. Unplug the HDs and see how it boots, 1st each slave, if you have any and then the bootable. It will obviously fail when you unplug the boot drive, but you will see if it hangs or not. If you see no difference unplug the CD/DVD and boot again. Then unplug all but one stick of RAM and try again, if nothing swap it for another stick and boot one more time. Last, or first if you want, unplug the the mouse and see what you get. And then the same with the keyboard, you may get a hang on that anyway depending on the BIOS settings but I don't think so.

If you have booted with everything unplugged except the PSU, MOBO and one stick of RAM that you have swapped, then you are limited to the, mobo, VGA, CPU, PSU and RAM. You would have already swapped RAM sticks so that is less likely.

I had an old PATA HD hang the boot so I unplugged it and problem solved. I thought the drive was bad, but I plugged it in a week later anyway to check, because I needed to search it. It booted right up and I haven't had a problem since. That was month ago, go figure.

The old USB screwing things up problem.
Happy to see an easy resolution.

Glad to hear you got it running again. Wondering if you could share some of your experience and tell us what device was creating the problem. Thanks.