Help an oldbie out :D

Computer Forum General Hardware
1

Hey guys, not been about much recently - work all the hours god sends at the moment (aka. too busy fixing other peoples machines to fix my own!)

Got a prob and hope to get some other educated guesses :smiley:
My comp with stall at start-up before bios post & without even waking up the tft’s 2 times out of three on a cold boot, the only way to get it up is to switch off at the psu, wait for hdd’s to spin down and try again. So far I have always managed to get it up and going… so far :S

Prob is that there is so much inside the comp to just start randomly pulling things out will take up way too much time as it is an intermittent fault as it is thus meaning hardware swaps over a number of days - just don’t have the time.

The only thing I do know that happens when it stalls is the cpu fan runs up to full speed and stays there, whereas when it is going to work it spins up to full then back down to the temp detected optimum.

Nothing wrong in event log, device manager is fine, memtest ok, burnintest 5.3 ran for an hour without errors, speedfan indepth SMART analysis of all 4 hdd’s is fine (all at least 90% health), 3dmark06 ran repetitively (thought it might have been the gfx) but never crashed and gets roughly 10k each time(normal).

So what i’m looking for is a educated guess/priority list of things to start checking one by one I guess.

HUGE TIA! (my computer info is fully up to date :D)

2

Processor fan is going bad ..Also what happens if you try safe mode ?

3

The fan going bad would not stop the system booting, it would simply overheat which it doesnt.

You cannot ‘try’ safe mode without getting past the post screens. The computer runs fine when it is up, it is just getting it up reliably.

4

if you get the time I’d recommended giving the PC a quick clean :slight_smile: (taking everything out)

5

Spooky, Took it into my work yesterday evening, blasted it all out with compressed air and gave it a full rebuild, still the same this morning, took 5 goes to get it up and running :frowning:

Cheers though :slight_smile:

So far ruled out, case fans, all usb devices, both ide drives & cold cathode.

Bet this is gonna turn out to be a mobo or psu fault, as they are the only things I don’t have spares of to hand at the mo.