Boot Problem (Boobs inside)

Andelusion · 21 Mar 2008 at 13:44

Hi guys, no boobs I'm afraid but you've gotta do something to get people's attention with this amount of threads

Anyway, I'm having boot problems.

Spec:

E6300 @ 3ghz.
Asus P5B Deluxe
2gb
8800GT
Corsair 520W PSU
Xp Sp2. Blah.

This started happening around Tuesday - I'll press the power button to boot up, everything spins up, but nothing POSTS and I get no beeps!. When this happened on Tues I rebooted a couple of times, and everything booted up fine, I took it as a hint and backed everything important up to my external HDD thankfully. When in windows the PC was working absolutely fine, no lockups, or anything.

Anyway, all was fine until today, I've tried for about an hour resetting, turning on/off, and the PC won't post at all, no beeps, nothing showing on monitor.

I've removed everything except the gfx and boot drive, but still nothing.

SO! Could someone give me a list of things to try to start to rule things out? I've read this kind of thing happening here lots of times, so imagine it will (fingers crossed) be easy enough to fix.

I have changed nothing in terms of hardware/software (nothing major anyway), so don't understand why it's just started happening. I'm not at home at the moment and remember I didn't try clearing CMOS, so will try that when I get back.

Thanks for any help you can give guys.

Andelusion · 21 Mar 2008 at 14:09

Cheers for the reply dude.

Nope no spare CPUs I'm afraid, I'm actually hoping that's all it is since that's pretty easy to replace!

I'll try all the things when I get back tommorow afternoon. Lots of things I didn't even think of.

Andelusion · 21 Mar 2008 at 14:35

I just want to know what's wrong to be honest, the most annoying thing is when something's not working and you have no explanation why. At least the P5B will be relatively inexpensive to replace if it is that that's borked.

Just want to get back to sort it out now! I'm at (parents) home for today and tommorow working though.

Andelusion · 21 Mar 2008 at 14:49

Thanks. Hmm I hope it's not my ram, its shexeh crucial 10th anniversary stuff.

I've had absolutely zero stability problems. I can't remember the last time the PC crashed/hung/wouldn't boot, it's been a dream to be perfectly honest.

I imagine taking out my optical drives too would lessen the load on the PSU? This is all stuff I can try, keep the suggestions coming if you have any guys

Andelusion · 22 Mar 2008 at 19:32

WELL!

Turns out it's my memory. I removed the 2nd stick and the PC booted fine. I've tried the presmably borked stick on its own and get the same result as with both sticks: no post, no error beeps.

There's nothing visably wrong with the chip, no marks/burns of any kind. I just wish I could memtest it or something but I can't boot with it at all. Is there any chance it's something else?! Seems pretty obviously the RAM though.

It's a 2x1gb match pair of Crucial 10th Anniversary sticks, they were produced in limited quantities so I'm not sure what I'm going to get as a replacement. Presumably I'll have to RMA both aswell and I don't have any spare RAM

Oh well, at least I know now.. time to carry out my first RMA!