PC Woes - Booting Problem

[neogramps]

Ok, so over the last week i've been having some annoying problems - basically my comp as been gradually getting worse at booting.

it started with taking ages to beep once i'd turned it on (beeps after gfx card initialised). i'd just installed the new nvidia drivers so i uninstalled, cleaned and installed older drivers. ok for a day or so.

then it persisted in being a nob, so i wiped my custom memory timings and let it go back to auto. once again, fine till the next day when I rebooted.

then my comp got stuck just as the windows logo appears for about a minute, then loaded up.

then today i couldn't get it to boot at all. it would vary between not posting and not getting into windows, even in safe mode, (no error messages). then it stopped booting.

so i cleared my CMOS and it booted fine, and as quickly as it used to.

now, although it's currently working, i'm wondering what diagnostics you'd recommend?

So far i've checked that temps are normal; HDD had no errors; registry looks fine; no viruses; no recent hw changes; all driver changes have been rolled back; planning to do a memtest; oh and power supply is stable.

Any thoughts?

[Fyndir]

That sounds suspiciously familiar to the problems I had a little while ago...in the end replacing my motherboard seemed to fix it. =S

[Hex]

Viruses and driver issues very seldom affect boot time, it sounds suspiciously like a hardware instability of some sort - my guess would be either memory or motherboard, probs mobo at a guess. Goto the forums for your motherboard and search for similar issues, you might find someone else has had the same problem.

[Captain_Caveman]

Check what you had changed recently in the BIOS, also see if there is a known fault with the motherboard that does that. You may need to flash it, also see if the driver tweaks for the graphics card updated the bios on the graphics card, it may be necessary to revert that although gfx cards rarely change the actual firmware on them. Kinda clutching at straws but maybe one of these things may be the problem.

[neogramps]

well this morning it refused to boot again; second time i tried with my modem turned off and it worked fine(a couple of articles mentioned that it can take ages to boot if your ethernet connection is up and running before your PC boots). seems to only cause problem when booting if it's been off for a while, so i'll need to test this network theory again when i get home from work.

if it still fails, i'll check the gfx fw

[DAve]

sounds like the battery backup on your motherboard might be to blame. Try and check the battery for charge with a multimeter or something.

That's the only thing I can think of that would cause the boot from cold behaviour to be different from warm. (Well, the only easily fixed thing)

[DAve]

additionally, backup your important data while you still can. Hardware problems are a pain, but to lose massive chunks of data would be a bigger pain.

[neogramps]

wouldn't the battery thing mean that my bios would be reset every day? I haven't noticed the settings change everyday?

[DAve]

wouldn't the battery thing mean that my bios would be reset every day? I haven't noticed the settings change everyday?
yeah, that could be one of the symptoms. It's worth a check if everything else is exhausted, and you seem to have thought of everything else.

If it's still restarting, try and get the minimum working system and work from there upwards (i.e. take everything non-essential out like audio and network cards) and see if it's still problematic.

Fingers crossed though.

[neogramps]

right; got home and left my modem off and it booted fine. will need to see if this helps

[LastChanceHotel]

If in doubt, take out your graphics card, RAM and other cards, then reseat them all. If that doesn't work, it's time to play the hardware diagnosis lottery game (tm).... ie, find someone with similar components and swap things around until the problem goes away.

Alternatively, go into 'administrative options' in control panel, and take a look at the event and error log. It usually has some helpful hints as to things that have gone wrong.

Jan

[neogramps]

well it worked again this morning - so maybe this network thing has some truth -i'll take a look into the event logs

[neogramps]

mmm- i think i may have solved it.
after a week, it stopped posting again on sunday. so i fiddled about and got it working. when it started i noticed the time was off by 8 hours; then I realised that my time had gradually been getting worse and worse for the past few months (losing about 10 minutes or more a week).

Also, when I went to start the other morning, it acted like it wasn't posting, but i left it for a full 5 minutes while i made my breakfast and it eventually posted, so I put 2 and 2 together.

it wasn't not posting, it was taking ages to post, and it was losing time, so my cmos battery must be buggered, but not completely, so i wasn't losing my bios settings, but it was struggling on startup and acting like it had to configure itself again (hence the long time to POst). I've replaced the CMOS battery, and it worked fine this morning.

I'll need to keep my fingers crossed for a couple of weeks till i can be sure, but i think that this has been the problem all along. what do you reckon? a feasible explanation?

[Phizz]

Strange how people seem to have probs with MB batteries. My MB is 3yrs old and still going strong. Must be the 16hrs of juice/day it gets.

[Bluepixie]

Curious indeed especially as your MB is still relatively new right? I'll be keeping my fingers crossed too, but it sounds like you've got it. :)

[neogramps]

yeah my mobo is only 9 months old, maybe less. i hope this is the problem, cos I can't be bothered RMA'ing my mobo.

[Strings]

Sounds reasonable that it could be the problem. 9 months may not be old, but it's hardly rare for a CMOS battery to go dud. Could have been a hard drive breaking, supply melting, chipset overheating... Just one of the many ailments that can afflict a healthy PC in the end.

Sure it'll be fine matey ;)

[DAve]

I've replaced the CMOS battery, and it worked fine this morning.
Smug mode engage.

Seriously though, glad you're up and running again. I'm sure Yega would have caught this problem way before us hardware n00bs waded in.

[neogramps]

mmm wonder what hex said...
anyway, been a while now and everything is fine - boots no problem, no longer losing time. cheapest fix ever. so glad i didn't have to RMA my mobo

[Hex]

Rofl, it really wasn't that offensive IMO but hey. Glad to hear the PC is all sorted gramps :-)

[neogramps]

And so it begins again.

Everything was fine till last night I had a sudden crash and I had to power off at the wall.

After that it posted but wouldn't boot to windows; and I spent an hour fiddling with settings and stuff and it kept alternating between posting but not booting, or just not posting at all (unless I powered off at the mains).

Flashed my CMOS, and it booted fine.

This morning it wouldn't post again, flashed my CMOS and it worked.

So, should I RMA my mobo and be without a decent PC for a while?

[YegaDoyai]

yes

[Hex]

Yega's short answer is pretty spot on, no brand new mobo should give you this much trouble tbh! It totally sucks, but you'll be thankful when you get a working board back :-)

[neogramps]

mmm just noticed my bios is some random beta which appears to have been withdrawn, so i'm going to try updating my chipset drivers and rolling back the bios to a stable release.

have also contacted Asus for tech support to pick their brains, but I doubt they'll be able to help more than you guys already have

[Hex]

watch what you do with the BIOS, you may not be able to return it if you fuck it up with a bad flash...

[neogramps]

it seems already fucked with the current bios - which was done by asus's fun little windows-based update tool which decided the best bios to install was a buggy-as-fuck beta which no-one else uses. and once you've "upgraded" you can't rollback using said tool, cos it tells you that you don't want to use an older bios.

need to wait till tomorrow night as i have no floppies or a floppy drive for that matter. bios flashing looks to be pretty simple as the flashing utility is built into the chip, so i don't even need a boot disk.

also i noticed when i was poking about that my DVD drives were in the 2ndary ide slot, now that i've moved them to primary slot they don't make a weird noise when trying to POST, and posting is noticably quicker, which is very odd

(found someone else with same problem, shame there's no solution or epilogue to this tale of woe http://forums.driverguide.com/showthread.php?t=6476)

Mmm, seems to be a few people with similar problems on this board. Solution is either new bios (old one corrupt), or RMA. i'm hoping the former, fully expecting the latter.

[neogramps]

Asus got back to me and suggested i update the bios - i salvaged a floppy drive from a spare PC and successfully installed the new bios with no errors. time will tell if it's ok.

also just noticed my bios chip isn't soldered on, it's a removable chip (£9 on ebay) so that may be worth a shot if this doesn't work.

note to self: never reinstall windows if you've lost your mobo CD :(

[neogramps]

ok so it's been almost a week and so far everything seems ok; but i'll need a month without problems to be convinced it's fixed to be honest. here's hoping

[neogramps]

ok so it's been 2 weeks - everything seems fine now - now weird crashes, no refusals to post.

even better, i felt lucky and decided to order another 1GB of ram cos it was only 40 quid - and it worked fine - now working happily with 2GB of RAM - let's hope it stays that way

[neogramps]

FFS!!! new ram is f***ing faulty - comp restarted twice overnight - ran memtest on the mew sticks and threw up a tonne of errors. And ebuyer doesn't have any in stock for replacement - so i'll prolly get a refund and have to go elsewhere for it

[Fyndir]

Lame. =(

What kind of RAM was it?

[neogramps]

OCZ

[neogramps]

hooray - a week and a half later and I have my replacement ram - 2 gigs of slick copper-coated goodness - and my mobo now auto-detects the correct speeds so no tweaking needed.

god my old bios was such a pile of crap - booting problems, unable to accept new ram, crap time keeping, wrong memory timings - no wonder they withdrew it