I'll make a long story short here. When I boot up my system will post, flash the boot utilities window as it normally does and then nothing. The monitor power LED will blink on & off for the length of time that it takes for the PC to go into sleep mode when it then turns yellow. Once it turns yellow I can move the mouse & then the login screen comes on as normal.
At first I thought it was my video card because I was having some issues, mainly while gaming, where the video would just lock up and I was getting a lot of graphics issues where ribbons of graphics would be projecting into infinity. Using the ATI tool I saw that I was getting a lot of fragmentation so I replaced my video card. Now, the game no longer freezes up, but I'm still getting a low FPS & sometimes getting the ribbons as well only not nearly as bad. Now, though the boot-up problem is much, much worse. I've also tried switching out the RAM and updating my BIOS which changed nothing. In addition, I've also had a couple of system crashes since where I get the dreaded blue screen o' death.
So, my best guess is that this is a motherboard or hard drive issue, possibly just a software issue. But I hate to keep just replacing parts, nor can I afford to, just to try to figure out which one has gone bad. I have yet to try to reformat either because I can't get it to go into the BIOS setup so that I can reset the boot order(bad move setting it not to, I know) So I'm asking the experts here to hopefully give me some better clues as to what to look for.
Here is the machine I am running:
PSU
Coolmax CX-500B 500W Silent Switching Power Supply w/120mm Silent Fan
Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard
Processor
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 Conroe 2.13GHz 2M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
Memory
Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Video Card
eVGA 512-P2-N570-AX Geforce 7900GTX 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Ex16
Hard Drive
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB Serial ATA II 7200RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer
At first I thought it was my video card because I was having some issues, mainly while gaming, where the video would just lock up and I was getting a lot of graphics issues where ribbons of graphics would be projecting into infinity. Using the ATI tool I saw that I was getting a lot of fragmentation so I replaced my video card. Now, the game no longer freezes up, but I'm still getting a low FPS & sometimes getting the ribbons as well only not nearly as bad. Now, though the boot-up problem is much, much worse. I've also tried switching out the RAM and updating my BIOS which changed nothing. In addition, I've also had a couple of system crashes since where I get the dreaded blue screen o' death.
So, my best guess is that this is a motherboard or hard drive issue, possibly just a software issue. But I hate to keep just replacing parts, nor can I afford to, just to try to figure out which one has gone bad. I have yet to try to reformat either because I can't get it to go into the BIOS setup so that I can reset the boot order(bad move setting it not to, I know) So I'm asking the experts here to hopefully give me some better clues as to what to look for.
Here is the machine I am running:
PSU
Coolmax CX-500B 500W Silent Switching Power Supply w/120mm Silent Fan
Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard
Processor
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 Conroe 2.13GHz 2M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
Memory
Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Video Card
eVGA 512-P2-N570-AX Geforce 7900GTX 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Ex16
Hard Drive
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB Serial ATA II 7200RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer