System won't boot at all - help?

[Mahogeny]

Hey, anyone have any ideas about this problem?

I have an Athlon 1600+XP with ECS K7S5A motherboard, 1 stick of CAS 2.5 Crucial DDR PC2100 memory (I think its PC2100 anyway), Creative Annihalator (sp?) II (GeForce2) video card with 64MB RAM, Turtlebeach Montego II sound card, Panasonic (I think?) 16x DVD drive, Plextor CD-RW 16/32x, Logitech cordless optical wheelmouse, 1 WD 12GB hdisk, 1 WD 30GB hdisk, 19" Viewsonic monitor (forgot the model), onboard 100Mbit/sec ethernet. I'm at work right now so if I forgot anything I'm sorry.

Here's the issue - last night I was playing a rousing game of Dungeon Keeper 2 when all of a sudden my system froze. The screen stayed the same, but no input was accepted from me. So, I hit the restart button. Once into Windows I loaded up DKII again, played for about 2 minutes and it froze again. Now, the ONLY thing I had changed on my system recently was installing a more recent Aureal driver to help with known MontegoII sound problems with DKII. But that had been hours previously and I had been playing DKII for a while with no problems. After this second crash, thinking it must be something up with DKII I rebooted and loaded up GTA3, which although it doesn't run great, I have yet to encounter any kind of CTD, blue screens, or freezes with it. After hijacking a taxi and playing for about 2 minutes, my system froze again. I rebooted again, thinking maybe I had a corrupted driver somewhere, or a problem with a disk.

However, this is where it gets fun - after this my system would not boot at all...

It was acting exactly as if the motherboard itself wasn't working properly - it just wouldn't load Windows ( I wish that was all) - oh no... it wouldn't even show ANYTHING upon booting up on the screen... the monitor's LED was flashing orange meaning "no video sync". After messing around with this thing for hours last night, I have done the following:
1) Took out my AGP video card and put in an old PCI video card.
2) Swapped video cable, monitor, power plug, and keyboard (and power outlet) when I swapped positions with my backup system.
3) Reseated every cable, my memory, and every card in the system.
4) Tried booting up without the sound card even in.
5) Reset the jumper on my motherboard to reset the CMOS settings.

NONE of it helped except for the time right after I reseated the memory module (and had also reset the CMOS settings the first time to default) the system came up one time without any problems, but as soon as I started GTA3 and played for a couple of minutes - it bombed again.
I haven't been able to get it to start up again since regardless of what I do. I have also reset the CMOS to default settings many times...

Anyone have any ideas as to what this could be? I think it must be one of the following:
1) Power supply
2) Motherboard
3) CPU
4) Memory

I think I have ruled out basically everything else.

Here are the symptoms and some other observations I made:
1) When it boots it seems like it is working like it should - but no video... the lights flash properly (even on the keyboard), it stays powered up, the drives sound normal when they start up, etc.
2) I have detected no failure in ANY fans anywhere including the fan on the AGP card and the CPU. I do use a heatsink, heatsink compound, and fan (forgot model, sorry) on the CPU and I am NOT overclocking, so I don't think it is an overheating problem (at least, not due to something like a fan breaking). I usually keep the system fairly clean of dust bunnies and other obstructions so there should be good air ventilation in there - I also tried booting it up several times without the case on.
3) I have not heard any funny noises or noticed any other abnormal behavior.
4) I have not had any kind of strange hardware problems lately - even intermittent ones.

Any suggestions would be nice. Oh yeah, I am running Windows 98SE.

Thanks.

 

[KillerCow]

Does it beep when it starts?
One beep? Multiple beeps? No beeps?

 

[Mahogeny]

No beeps - when I tried booting it up one time (for the heck of it) without the memory, then it beeped a lot...

 

[Vortex22]

Sounds like both you and I are going through a similar hell. 🙁

I've got video, but am getting crazy lockups and reboots, especially if I try to play a game.

If I manage to fix my problem before you do I'll make sure to let you know what it was. 😕

 

[Mahogeny]

Heh, Vortex22 - thanks...

Although, in all honesty, even though a memory and/or motherboard failure is a pain, I think I'd rather have my current problem then yours - I mean, at least I am pretty sure WHERE the problem is (has to be something attached to the motherboard if the system won't even POST) - only thing is that it will cost some $$ to fix it... ugh 🙁

Your problem on the other hand, could be ANYTHING at this point, it sounds... like I said on the post you put up for your situation, I hassled with a problem like yours several years ago for a good few weeks before I found switching the PCI cards around in a different order fixed it... but good luck to you...

 

[KillerCow]

Continuous long beeps means no RAM.

No beeps and no POST on a new system typically mean either (in this order of likelyhood):
1) bad CPU
2) bad RAM
3) bad motherboard
4) bad PSU

It can honestly be any of those. It's uncommon for any of these to fail once it's in the field -- but the PSU is the most likely to go. Try reseating the CPU, you didnt say that you tried -- it's a long shot, but thats all I can think of. Also, examine all of the pins on your DDR sockets, make sure that none are bent or obstructed... but I dont know how that would happen in a working machine. Try swapping the PSU with a spare, if that doesn't work, you will have to swap out the other components until you find the fault. I hope you have spares -- if not you'll have to take it in for service 🙁 .

It's unusual that you reset switch still works. Typically, when this happens on a new box, the reset switch won't reboot a machine that fails to POST. I don't know what it means in your case.

 

[Mahogeny]

Thanks for your input KillerCow...

I have some new information from last night about this situation:

When I got home from work, I tried booting up the system and it worked! The only thing is that my CMOS settings had be reset again, but this could have been due to my clearing out the CMOS settings from one of my failed attempts to get the system up the night before. After getting the system up, I immediately rebooted it to see what would happen. It rebooted without any problems, and it retained the CMOS settings.

So far, so good - to see if the freeze problem has anything to do with how long the system has been up, or if it is random, or has something to do with playing computer games, I played MP3's for like half an hour and surfed the web all without problems...

Next, I started up Max Payne - after playing for about 15 to 20 minutes, I tried to go back to GTA3 (because that was one of the games I tried that would freeze my system). After playing it for just a few minutes my system didn't freeze - no - it just completely DIED.

I have never seen a system do that unless the power goes out, and I don't THINK that the power just went out because the lights didn't even flicker and we did not have a storm. All of a sudden, the system just completely powered off. I noticed while it was running that all the fans and everything seemed to be working fine.

I tried to boot it up again and it just would not come up - I mean to say that everything seemed to power up like before but just no video.

Is it possible that this sounds like a bad PSU? I did use a PSU that I have had for a few years, so it could have gone bad - the other components (memory, RAM, and CPU) are all fairly new (less than six months old at the most).

I thought that usually when a PSU goes bad that it just completely dies - so it is possible that the PSU is "spiking" or something - just enough to unsettle the CPU to make the system freeze - and perhaps intermittently enough to cause the system to be allowed to boot sometimes?

I can't help but thinking that only if I am playing a graphics intensive game (i.e., memory, CPU, and graphics card intensive) that the system will take a dump. During this time is the system perhaps a bit more "prone" to power surges from the PSU?

I am thinking that if I can get the system up tonight then I will just let the system run and see what happens - no games, no screensavers, etc.

Anyway, thanks for your help - I'm leaning towards the PSU as well but I will take your advice about reseating the CPU - I did not think to do that... but as that can be a pain I may wait and see if I can get the system back up tonight for its little test...

Thanks again,
Mahogeny

 

[KillerCow]

Ok.
It is most likely the PSU then.

I thought that usually when a PSU goes bad that it just completely dies - so it is possible that the PSU is "spiking" or something

The ATX PSUs are funny. They put out all kinds of different voltages, if any of the voltage regulation stuff goes, you will get intermitant crashes. If you have an old PSU, it is probably not rated to run all of you new stuff. It's likely that it's +12volt circuitry if very rugged (for alot of drives) but the +3.3 stuff is not so great.

Check out the ATX specification if you are interested in how things are supposed to work. Page 23 has the spec for an ATX power connector.
And take a look at AMD's buyers guide, page 10 has power requirements.