Boot strangeness-- have to wipe CMOS every time

treesloth

Distinguished
Dec 13, 2010
4
0
18,510
Hi to all. Please let me know if I'm posting in the wrong place.

I have a homebuilt system with an Asus P5Q SE+ mobo and pretty ordinary components-- 6GB Kingston RAM, OCZ SSD, decent video card, etc. Nothing special, a utility computer. I recently moved and brought this system with me. Since the move, I'm having a strange problem getting the computer to boot reliably. If I do nothing to intervene, when I press the power button the system goes through a sort of 3-stage attempt at booting, but ultimately fails. First, it turns on for only a couple of seconds-- fans go, etc, followed by a brief silence. Second, it turns back on, fans going, some drive activity (clicking, whirring, nothing substantial) keyboard briefly lights up, then silence. Third and finally, it's back on with fans and a little drive clicking, but no monitor activation, and it just stays there indefinitely. It takes about 10 seconds to reach this third stage.

Now, after much poking about, I've discovered that unplugging, moving the CMOS wipe jumper for 10 seconds, moving it back (that is, just following Asus' method for CMOS clearing) and plugging back in and starting it causes it to work just fine! I have to do the "F1 Setup/F2 Continue" thing, but otherwise it's great. Of course, I can't reboot without going through this whole strange process again.

Any suggestions? I've truly never run into such a problem, and can't quite come up with the right search terms to look for more information about it. Many thanks in advance for any ideas.