Random Failure To Re-Boot

[Feisters]

Just built a new budget system for a friend. Specs: ECS K7S5A mobo, AMD 1700+, 256M PC2100, WD 40G hdd, AOpen GF4MX-420 vid, AOpen case with AOpen 300w P.S., XP Home.

When I first built the system a few days ago, everything went smoothly. Then, as I began installing software and had to perform restarts, the system wouldn't restart. It'd go through the P.O.S.T., then hang at a black screen. When I press the reset button, it will p.o.s.t. again, and present me with the XP boot option screen (Safe Mode, Normal, etc.) It doesn't really matter what I select, sometimes XP will load, and sometimes it will just hang again. Sometimes I might have to hit the reset button 3 or 4 times before it will reboot.

At first I thought it was the XP installation gone bad. However, midway through the third time of reinstalling XP, it did it several time when XP had to reboot during the installation process. I finally got XP installed again, and the system runs just fine. Stable as can be. It's only when I do a restart that it randomly won't restart. I know it's not heat related, but I'm fairly certain it is a hardward issue. I'm thinking that something isn't initializing correctly.

I'm at my wits end. Any thoughts?

 

[PvtB]

It's hard to say what might be the problem, unless you find some failure patterns. Try disconnecting different components to see which one could be the problem. Make sure your BIOS settings relating to RAM/CPU/FSB/HDD are at their default settings.

 

[Feisters]

Well, it ended up being the ram. This board has two DDR slots (and two SDRAM slots). I had populated slot 0 with one 256 meg stick of PC2100 DDR. I removed that stick, and placed a 64 meg stick of SDRAM into slot 2. Problem solved - kind of. At least I knew to focus on the ram. I then removed the SDRAM and went back and placed a different 256 meg stick of PC2100 into slot 0. Same problem occurred again. I then stuck the second stick of PC2100 into slot 1, and all is right with the world now. I don't know if it's because it's 256 meg sticks that slots 0 and 1 have to be populated, or if a single 128 meg stick would work. I can't keep going out and buying ram just to find out, so my friend's going to end up with 512 megs of ram. (She didn't complain.)