Exceedingly bizzare problem

siyan

Member
Dec 27, 2004
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Whenever I try to start my computer off a cold boot, the following happens.

1. Random whirring, occasionally followed by a restart after the first "beep" (you know...computers are supposed to beep once when starting).

2. Hard drives (I believe its the HDs) make some repeating squeaking noises and you can hear the drive heads shuffle around a few times.

3. System appears to hang on IDE detection, but in reality the squeaking just keeps going on and about 40-50 seconds later it detects the drives properly.

4. Attempts to start windows, but the process is very slow and hangs evenutally. Sometimes during the part with the little grey bar at the bottom (usually you hardly even see this part), but usually at the part where you see "Windows XP" with the little blue bar thing going at the bottom.

5. After this, if I just press reset, everything works fine. And yes the process has been getting slower and it has been hanging "earlier" in the process (when it just started it would hang at the same moment every time, which I could see by watching how many times the little blue windows progress bar thing cycled and where it stopped).

I have removed the CD drive and tested it with no luck. I've also run low level diagnostic tools on the HDs and everything came out clean. At this point I suspect the motherboard, but I'm not certain.

Btw my system is a Barton 2500 on a A7N8X Deluxe rev 2, HDs are dual Seagate 7200.7 PATA 120GB on the same channel (won't fit any other way due to cable issues).

Any ideas? Sorry for the long post.
 

Saga

Banned
Feb 18, 2005
2,718
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I had this a TON on my A7V880. Some ASUS boards HATE the small power surge that some power supplies give on a cold boot. ASUS boards love to give you the ever descriptive "overclock failed" error (which on the socket A boards is just a beep). On my board it did numerous things from hanging on windows load to simply not kicking the video card in (PSU, Processor, everything was whirring up but no video display other than the backlight).

If your PSU has a cold start voltage inrease you might want to toggle it if possible. If this is not an option I would suggest swapping to basically any other PSU you can get your hands on and test that.
 

siyan

Member
Dec 27, 2004
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Its a 380W antec, same one I"ve used since the computer was put together and only recently has it been faltering.

Oh well I'll check stuff on another motherboard. Just want to make *certain* that it isn't the HDs.
 

OdiN

Banned
Mar 1, 2000
16,430
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Originally posted by: siyan
Its a 380W antec, same one I"ve used since the computer was put together and only recently has it been faltering.

Oh well I'll check stuff on another motherboard. Just want to make *certain* that it isn't the HDs.

Well..then run a checkdisk on the drives.