i'm in need of some techie insight...

ever since i put together my current desktop pc (i know enough about computers to have done that a few times) it has behaved strangely during bootup. when i push the power button the lights inside the case come on and hard drives start spinning, etc, but nothing shows up on the screen. no POST, no nothin. then after a delay (sometimes 1 second, sometimes 20 minutes), with no intervention on my part, the power appears to go away (lights off, no noise) and then comes back and everything starts up normally.

i have no clue why my pc seems to do this 'false start' every time i power it on, and it makes me never want to turn it off since sometimes it takes forever to hit the point where it is actually booting up.

any ideas? everything works fine once this hiccup is passed...

This one's a new one on me; other than making sure your RAM is seated well in their sockets, I wouldn't know what to do.

Don't forget the Travel Technology forum; the geeks over there really know their stuff.

i forgot about the travel tech forum, although this has no relation to travel so i'm not sure if i'd get berated. mods perhaps this could be moved if appropriate ?

This thread will get lost in the OMNI shuffle so we're passing you over to the ever-so-helpful folks in our Travel Technology Forum.

Good luck.


____________________

Cholula
OMNI Co-Moderator

It could be any hardware thing, and the only way to track it down is to substitute hardware elements one by one. I'd start with the power supply.

Do you have any external drives connected to the machine? If so, disconnect the drives and reboot. I had a similar problem where it took about 20 minutes just to start windows and had 6 external drives connected. I disconnected all drives, rebooted and then reconnected the drives. Problem solved!

Are there any lights on the mother board that come on? Or do you mean the lights inside the case?

It sounds like there is no power to the mother board, or the motherboard may be dead.

Of course, there may not be any lights on the motherboard to come on, so unless you know for sure there were it may look the same. If there are lights on, it's getting power.

Without any post beeps at all, I would say motherboard or power supply issue not properly powering the mother board. Check those connections. The disk and case lights will come on anyways, motherboard or not.

i do see this sometimes as a separate problem with my external usb hdds, but yea i've disconnected them all and this boot 'hiccup' persists.

i also have the feeling that no post beeps means psu or mobo. the lights that come on are externally visible ones like the dvd drive, and front of case leds for power. and i can hear fans spinning. i believe the mobo leds internal to the case also light up during the hiccup cycle but i haven't powered up with the case off in a while.

i'll try a new psu and do more research this time to make sure it is explicitly suitable for my abit IP35-E mobo. thanks for the help!

I would try replacing the hard drive first. Or even just a clean full re-install with a new partition layout.

-David

even though all this behavior is before the POST ?

oh, yeah. I guess not.

-David

99 percent is a hardware problem.

Start with your power supply. If you can borrow a PS from a friend then try to test that if its going to behave the same thing. But first check all the connections, power, cables and see to it its properly connected.

If its a ram problem then there should be some beeping sound, same thing if its a video card so you can rule out those two but in some rare cases you won't hear a beep on ram problem but thats only about 5 percent of the time.

I'm pretty sure its not a hard drive because you don't need a hard drive to see the post.

while looking around on abit's website for psu recommendations i noticed owners of the IP35-E mobo complaining about 'double-booting' and apparently this is a known issue with early bios that has been fixed as of 2007. guess i should update my bios more often...