PC won\'t start

[tunester63]

Last week PC would not start. It would start to power up and shut down after 1- 2 seconds. I pulled the PSU and tested it externally and it ran fine. I connected 1 DVD drive and PSU would slowly die. I figured it was DOA. I replaced the PSU and everything powered up and ran fine. Now (4 days later) the PC is doing the same thing, starts to power up and dies.

 

[demonsparkx]

Last week PC would not start. It would start to power up and shut down after 1- 2 seconds. I pulled the PSU and tested it externally and it ran fine. I connected 1 DVD drive and PSU would slowly die. I figured it was DOA. I replaced the PSU and everything powered up and ran fine. Now (4 days later) the PC is doing the same thing, starts to power up and dies.

sounds to me "though very unlikely" a bad streak with PSU'S. i highly doubt though possible,that IS the case with your situation. seeing as you stated you "tested them outside the machine" either by jumping pins, or powering a dvd ect drive external,something somewhere along the line, in your build is causing a short and premature life in the PSU unit themselves. do either of the PSU's show any signs of blown caps, heated resistors, the blinking green power light? im a newcomer but im usually pretty good with troubleshooting.

 

[tunester63]

Last week PC would not start. It would start to power up and shut down after 1- 2 seconds. I pulled the PSU and tested it externally and it ran fine. I connected 1 DVD drive and PSU would slowly die. I figured it was DOA. I replaced the PSU and everything powered up and ran fine. Now (4 days later) the PC is doing the same thing, starts to power up and dies.

More info

Monitor used to come right on. I noticed after the new PSU went in it would take about 10 seconds for the monitor to start up. I just tried it again and I heard the HDD spool up and both DVD's lights came on but the monitor never did and the PC shut down (This was about 10-12 seconds into power up). I waited a few seconds and tried again and now it is running but monitor still takes a little bit to come on. Any chance the old (bad) PSU messed up the video card and that is causing the new problem?

 

[demonsparkx]

More info

Monitor used to come right on. I noticed after the new PSU went in it would take about 10 seconds for the monitor to start up. I just tried it again and I heard the HDD spool up and both DVD's lights came on but the monitor never did and the PC shut down (This was about 10-12 seconds into power up). I waited a few seconds and tried again and now it is running but monitor still takes a little bit to come on. Any chance the old (bad) PSU messed up the video card and that is causing the new problem?

VERY possible. as i have heard from many many experience PC builders, the PSU is the single most important component of the system. your trusting all your hardware's to a single piece of hardware the -PSU
in some cases the psu decides to fail, or naturally dies over long term usage,its possible that it can release high amounts of un-regulated current to anything that it is connected to. IE: surge. while it may or may not be the case of the video card, a short somewhere on the MB is far beyond my reach to help with since theres such an extreme amount of micro components. what you CAN try checking,is capacitors and resistors on the mobo itself. not always,but sometimes it can be easy to spot if an area got overloaded. worse case scenario, youd just need a new motherboard and possible replace anything that might of gotten fryed. the monitor issue is leading me to belive it just may be a mobo/gpu issue due to a surge. if possible id say try a trusted brand PSU that you know is already working, possibly borrow from a friend ect. im sorry to hear you having this issue. and wish the best of luck. reply if u have anything else to add or ask.

 

[tunester63]

I finally got a chance to check things. I pulled the video card and the PC will run for about 5 seconds and shut down. I checked all of the connections and everything seemed OK so I put the video card back in just to make sure it was seated and it ran but the startup screen said "no bootable partition found". I pulled all of the connections to the HDD's and DVD's one by one and it shuts down after a few seconds. I'm thinking about pulling the RAM cards one by one but it sounds more like a mobo problem.

 

[tunester63]

More info. I have 4 RAM cards in. I pulled all 4 and PC runs fine (no video but I think this is the norm?). I put the RAM cards back 2 at a time - I have 2 1GB & 2 256 MB and the mobo (ASUS KN8 SLI) calls for inserting in pairs of same size as long as 1&2 and 3&4 are the same size . Any card in any slot makes the PC shut down after 5 seconds. Is the mobo toast or did the previous bad PSU fry the RAM? I can't see any obvious things wrong but there are a ba-zillion components.


I was able to get the PC up and running 4 days ago and I left it on and programs seemed to work fine. It seems if it is a RAM problem I wouldn't have been able to run programs over the last few days.

 

[tunester63]

Problem solved. Bad PSU fried 1 RAM stick. I reset CMOS and installed good RAM and now it runs. Screen said "no active partition found". Do I have reload Windows?

 

[demonsparkx]

Problem solved. Bad PSU fried 1 RAM stick. I reset CMOS and installed good RAM and now it runs. Screen said "no active partition found". Do I have reload Windows?

man that sucks, always be carefull with pu's they have the easy potential to fry about anything. and yes it seems your windows got corrput, or your hard drive. id try and do a fresh load of windows