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Socoder -> Off Topic -> PC fails to boot!

Sat, 05 Apr 2008, 09:34
spinal
Here's an odd problem, I have a computer that...

1. a lot of times does not boot up fully into windows, it gets to the egg timer mouse pointer then crashes. After this point it may not even get this far and must be left off for a period of time before it will fully boot again.

2. on the occasions that it does boot up fully, it will happily sit powered up for weeks at a time with no problems.

3. upon resetting the machine return to point 1.

any suggestions?

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Sat, 05 Apr 2008, 10:15
JL235
Check the power wires and connectors, make sure none of them are damaged. This used to cause problems on mine.

Otherwise, reinstall Windows.
Sat, 05 Apr 2008, 14:48
Jayenkai
Sounds odd.
I'd suggest maybe the processor's overheating.
Give it a good vacuuming, might do the trick.

I probably should mention that my system takes 2 boots to get into Windows.
Not sure what that's all about, but it only happens in XP, which is on the secondary drive, so.. might be something to do with that.
Either way, it boots up fine the 2nd time

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Sat, 05 Apr 2008, 15:53
Scherererer
If you boot into safe mode, will it consistantly boot up okay?

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Sun, 06 Apr 2008, 00:15
HoboBen
Might be worth taking a look at your hard drive - an old PC I had dating back to 1999 started to give up in 2006. The hard drive would fail to mount about 75% of the time. There's a neat tool called SpeedFan that's got a tab for the S.M.A.R.T. info that most hard drives nowadays provide and it should give you some idea of the health of it.

It's also got temperature sensors, if anything is overheating. It's snowing over here, and my CPU is apparently at 4 to 5 degrees C, which is cool in both senses of the word

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Sun, 06 Apr 2008, 03:58
spinal
power supply is brand new, just been changed as I thought that might have been the problem. All connections are fine. The two hard driver are also brand new (1x500gb, 1x250gb), they should be fine. Windows has just bee reinstalled, it took all day, because every time the setup restarted the machine it wouldn't boot back up and had to be left a while. I am now assuming that something on the motherboard is overheating. But I still don't understand how when it does boot, it can stay on for weeks with absolutely no problems at all.

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Sun, 06 Apr 2008, 04:37
Jayenkai
Yeah, it sounds like it's overheating, to be honest.
I'd imagine that booting windows, having all your drivers initialise, and getting all those programs to start all at once might be taking it's tole.
Perhaps try Hobo's little startup utility, to get things a bit more organised.

My poor little Celeron downstairs tends to overheat quite a bit, but once it's gotten up and running it's happy as larry.. Up until you try a mammoth gaming session of a good hour or two, then it freaks out a little!!

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Sun, 06 Apr 2008, 04:58
spinal
Hobos thingy wont be much help i think, the system doesn't even get far enough to load something. Looks like a trip to some shop or other, for a new mobo and probably processor.

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Sun, 06 Apr 2008, 06:18
Jayenkai
Yeay! New PC
Sun, 06 Apr 2008, 08:36
JL235
Booting is usually the most stressfull part of a PC's life.
Sun, 06 Apr 2008, 09:27
Scherererer
Try flashing the BIOS, it sounds to me like you're having a problem just with booting. Which brings to mind that the BIOS is corrupted, the boot.ini is corrupted (which should be fixed by reinstalling, the MFT might be corrupted (although you'd notice that trying to access the harddrive once its booted), the hard drive might be dying (though its new so that's probably not the case),.,.,., if i think of anything else i'll jot it down on here

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Sun, 06 Apr 2008, 09:55
spinal
booting itself seems fine, the system gets most of the way through loading windows. Usually it gets up to the blue screen and the mouse pointer shows up, then resets. you think it could still be the bios that late in loading?

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Sun, 06 Apr 2008, 10:27
Scherererer
hmm... probably not... you said you reinstalled windows and its still having the same problem? if that's the case i'm guessing it would be a hardware issue

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Sun, 06 Apr 2008, 10:33
HoboBen
One last thing I would suggest is unplugging every peripheral attached to the machine - mouse, printers, scanners and perhaps even the keyboard, in case any of those are faulty and sending bad signals to the OS.

I can't remember exactly what the problem was, but a faulty zip drive caused my windows 98 machine to BSOD (but then again, win 98, just clicking on Start caused enough BSOD's!)

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