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Strange startup

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status1   09-06-2009 at 09:06:55 PM

Not sure which forum to place this in
I have a pc that was working fine until recently. What happens is when I first turn it on from a cold start I hear the fans and I see the power and the led lights come on the all of a sudden it goes off no lights no sound from the fan than after about 4-5 seconds it continues booting as if nothing happened. All this happens right at the beginning before there is anything on the screen

Did anyone come across this problem ?

If I shut it down and restart it it doesn't do it only if it's been off for a while and even then it's only once in a while so it's not consistent
It's very strange

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Bronze CPUs badge jsc   09-06-2009 at 09:42:15 PM

My Gigabyte motherboards do that when I boot with failed OC settings.

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impaledmango   09-06-2009 at 10:53:31 PM

status1 wrote :

Not sure which forum to place this in
I have a pc that was working fine until recently. What happens is when I first turn it on from a cold start I hear the fans and I see the power and the led lights come on the all of a sudden it goes off no lights no sound from the fan than after about 4-5 seconds it continues booting as if nothing happened. All this happens right at the beginning before there is anything on the screen

Did anyone come across this problem ?

If I shut it down and restart it it doesn't do it only if it's been off for a while and even then it's only once in a while so it's not consistent
It's very strange



More details would help (i.e. Syste, specs, do you overclock?, OS etc.)

Reply to impaledmango
daship   09-06-2009 at 11:54:14 PM

Your power supply has lots its stand bye power, or maybe its caused from a dead cmos battery.

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Bronze CPUs badge Twoboxer   09-07-2009 at 01:51:52 AM

^+1. Try replacing the cmos battery.

It sounds like your PC is loading BIOS, detecting something is wrong, reloading a workable BIOS and rebooting (successfully). When not used, the "good" CMOS settings are lost.

That's the theory anyhow.

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status1   09-07-2009 at 09:24:21 PM

Twoboxer wrote :

^+1. Try replacing the cmos battery.

It sounds like your PC is loading BIOS, detecting something is wrong, reloading a workable BIOS and rebooting (successfully). When not used, the "good" CMOS settings are lost.

That's the theory anyhow.



That sounds like a plausible theory since a few weeks ago when I booted up it stopped with an error about the clock which might be understandable if I didn't use the pc in a while but I use it daily so that was somewhat of a surprise when that happened. After adjusting the clock it stayed there. In other words I never got any messages about the clock after that so I figured it' was maybe a bad contact but it's a definite suspect now

The motherboard is less than 3 years old so I am not sure how long these cmos batteries should last

When you say "your PC is loading BIOS, detecting something is wrong, reloading a workable BIOS and rebooting (successfully)" Are you saying that when it detects something is wrong it actually stops the pc by turning off the power?
Why wouldn't it just throw an error and stop so someone would have a clue as to what is wrong ?
Or is this the way these newer pc's work ?
I will definitely have to open up the pc and look at the cmos battery to see if I can find anything

Reply to status1
Bronze CPUs badge Twoboxer   09-07-2009 at 09:38:07 PM

Hehe. BIOS (Basic I/O System) is simple code, and expedient measures are often taken. If it detects something wrong, and if it has the ability to repair that and choose to start over, it will simply reboot itself. So the sequence starts all over again.

Why don't they post an error message? Hehe. Why are Windows error messages incomprehensible to mortal mankind?

Reply to Twoboxer
status1   09-09-2009 at 02:38:05 AM

I changed the cmos battery yesterday and so far so good
I measured the battery and it still shows 3.0V It's a KTS battery I am not sure if it has any significance but it's the second KTS battery I replaced The other one was on a different motherboard that was also about 3 years old but that was less often used and I knew it was the cmos battery because I kept loosing the settings in bios.
The new battery is a SONY and measured 3.26v before I installed it
I guess these newer boards are more sophisticated
Thanks for the help.

Reply to status1
status1   09-12-2009 at 03:58:41 PM

Well it looks like that wasn't the problem because it happened again this morning
The motherboard is an ASROCK775i65g with an Intel cpu

Is there anything I can check for in the Bios ? Any settings I should check or change ?

Reply to status1
Bronze CPUs badge Twoboxer   09-12-2009 at 06:59:15 PM

Well - if you have not been overclocking - the next most logical thing is as daship said above . . . your psu may be failing. The way to tell is to swap in a borrowed/new one - no other test is going to show it.

If you have been overclocking or otherwise poking in BIOS, go back to stock (defaults) and save the BIOS - and see if that works.

Reply to Twoboxer
status1   09-13-2009 at 01:05:44 AM

I have not been overclocking. I don't see why the power supply would be failing just as the pc strats up and then runs fine all day until I turn it off and then on the next day

I still think something is wrong in the bios because of that lost time issue in the past
I tried setting it back to default but I think it was already at default so I don't think anything has changed

I have quite a few settings in bios that I am not familiar with so I didn't even mess with it when I installed the motherboard about 3 years ago

It's in the Advanced settings of bios
One of them is Suspend to ram
Does anyone know what that means ?

Reply to status1
status1   09-23-2009 at 02:16:21 AM

Just a small update in case anyone has any information

I have this POST diagnostic card that I installed in the pc and I finally was able to catch it where it stops although I am not sure if the error code is correct
The last number I saw on the display before it reset itself was 13 hex
According to the manual the code for AMI bios that I have is

"Error Code – 13
AMI (13)DMA controller#1,#2,interrupt controller#1,#2disa- bled. About to disable Video display and initialize port-B. Chipset initialize/auto memory detection about to begin. Replace first memory SIMM.(13)Chipset initialize/auto memory detection
about to begin. Check first SIMM.(13) Interrupt vectors initialized."

I am not sure what that all means but perhaps someone here has more knowledge about it than I do

Reply to status1
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