Machine boots and freezes

chess9

Elite member
Apr 15, 2000
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I've been helping a friend with his computer and we've run into a problem we can't solve. The machine starts, does the POST routine, finds the hard drive, starts Windows, then simply freezes. I've swapped out everthing (memory, agp card, hard drive, and cpu, cables) except the power supply. I'm going to do that next, but is this the kind of problem caused by, say, a power supply not putting out enough voltage, or one that is intermittent? I've reset the CMOS, and checked and double checked everything. I'm wondering if I've missed something. This is a Soyo 5HEM board with a K62-400 cpu, and fairly new Maxtor hard drive. The guy used MaxBlast to format the hard drive, but I did a low level format, fdisked, formatted and loaded Windows without a problem. If I move the hard drive to another machine, the machine boots cleanly into Windows! So, I doubt it's the hard drive. I replaced the cpu with an Intel cpu and it still does the same thing. I replaced the AGP card and still had the same problem. I replaced the ram with 64 megs of different PC100 and with some HSDRAM, but that didn't fix it. This Soyo motherboard is a replacement for the prior motherboard that has two blown IDE channels, we think.

Anyway, anyone think it's the PS? Or something else? I'm stumped.

Thanks.
 

Fardringle

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2000
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Is this Windows95? If so, you need to download the patch for Win95 and AMD CPU's faster than 350Mhz. There is a timing issue with Win95 that causes the system to not work properly with the faster K6 processors. You can get the patch and all of the information you need here.
 

chess9

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Apr 15, 2000
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Obenton:

It seems to be doing so. The bios is the latest version (this year's) and automatically detects the drive.

You don't think it's the PS, eh?
 

chess9

Elite member
Apr 15, 2000
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Mem:

It won't boot into safe mode. Just freezes after the Windows logo appears. ?? Wierd. Thanks for asking.