Brand New PC Eventually booting after many restarts

[Vanadil]

Hi guys,

Ok, I'm literally out of ideas with this system. This might be a bit long but any ideas at all would be welcome! The specs are as follows:

Corsair Twin3X 2x1GB DDR3 DHX

AMD ATHLON II X2 250 sAM3

A/Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2 - For noise rather than heat dissapation

Asus 4350 SILENT/DI/512MD

GByte GA-MA74GMT-S2 Motherboard

1TB HITACHI 7K2000 SATA HDD

It's also using a brand new 500W Casecom power supply (Why will be explained in a moment).


Upon installing all of the hardware and loading up Windows 7 Enterprise, all seemed to be working fine. I installed all neccasary drivers and software, restarted and got a blue screen..... ok... Driver problems? So I rolled back and uninstalled the last lot and... blue screen.... ok... sod it, full re-install. Works fine. All drivers..... Works fine. Ok, all good.

Then, I give it to my G/f's Dad as intended, set it up and it gets to the spining dots for the windows logo and resets itself. Again and again. I turn it off and then it boots after giving me the "Start windows normally" option. This, I'm informed in a few days time, happens everytime that the PC boots. However, once the PC has booted, ALL hardware and software works perfectly and if not turned off will stay working fine.

Eventually after a week of this i get a call stying that it won't turn on. The PC itself was connected to a UPS installed by a guy that they use to "clean the PC" and maintain it for them (Rip off merchant). He sold them this UPS for £65 and I have no idea how old it is and my G/f's dad assures me that the "Motor burnt out recently and had to be replaced"..... what this means is up for interpretation...... I take out the old power supply (500W Casecom) and install a 550W PSU from one of my own systems to see how it goes. PC turns on but does the same as before with the boot.

So, I leave it like this and AGAIN I get the call saying it won't turn on. Both the 500W and my 550W had been working fine in previous systems which had more power draw for years! So rather than waste another PSU I ordered the casecome 500W to test as it'll easily be good enough for what he uses it for (The GPU is there just to run aero. He just goes on Ebay). I also removed the UPS and replaced it with a simple surge protected 5 way. AGAIN, same boot problem and eventually works.

So.... I tried an IDE hard drive, no SATA plugged in, same problem. I tried removing a Gig of ram, same problem, I tried unplugging EVERYTHING other than the CPU and hard drive (Runing off internal gpu) and still the same.

I then took the SATA HDD home and tried it in my PC and it booted fine.


My only conclusion is that it's either the BIOS or MoBo itself. Does anyone have and ideas at all?!

Thanks a lot for any replies.

 

[ubercake]

Random boots could mean an issue with the RAM. I also had a bad video card (new out of the box) that caused this.

Can you run memtest or get far enough to schedule a Windows Memory Diagnostic during one of the boots?

 

[Vanadil]

Hi Uber,

Thanks for the reply.

I've tried both of these things unfortunatley. Both individual sticks of RAM at one time and removing the GPU. Also, after the boot when it does work the memory and GPU works perfectly fine until the PC is turned off.

 

[ubercake]

You got no errors from the RAM tests?

Can you swap in another video card?

One other thing to try - I saw someone having issues similar to this because they had the incorrect setting for their front audio in the BIOS causing shorts - is to change the front audio setting in the BIOS from HD Audio to AC'97 Legacy and see how that runs (last thing to try before you start investing in hardware)?