GA-P35C-DS3R Won't Post Naturally!

To be honest, I don't know whether my issues were entirely down to the motherboard. The issues seem to be fixed (for now) but I don't know why or how. It may relapse at any point again which doesn't fill me with confidence.

In the end, I discovered 1GB of faulty ballistix memory which was sitting in slot two. So I guess it was a blessing in disguise although it didn't feel like it at the time!

silent, I don't have any IDE kit so can't offer you any real guidance.

z
 
Actually, come to think of it, I did have an issue when I installed Vista when I had both my sata drives plugged in. Vista didn't find any hard drives so I couldn't install it. In the end, I just unplugged one drive and vista found a hard disk and installed ok. I then plugged my other hard disk back in and formatted it within vista.

Never did work out what that was all about.

z
 
I'm not running it any raid mode. Just pure and simple (but obviously not simple enough for vista!).

Just for the record, PC has been stable. Mind you, haven't shut it down yet!

Have RMA'd the RAM so am only running on 2Gb.

z
 
Hi Benm, it might be worth running a cpu test using another application just to be sure. I used everest to hammer my cpu overnight. There are probably other apps out there which do a similar thing.

Two apps reporting the same issue with the core probably means a cpu issue.

z

PS No idea why disabling the power saving options worked for both you and me!
 
It's happened again!

Ok, after months of stability, I've had the issue again except I cannot recover it.

Basically, my son hit the sleep button on the keyboard yesterday while the PC was on. This put the PC into some kind of hibernation mode.

After clicking and hitting the keyboard, I was unable to revive the PC so hit the power on and off button.

The PC came on, halted and then switched off. It then came on again, beeped and then nothing. It was similar to when the PC has some kind of bios issue and then retries to revert to default settings.

I've replaced the battery, jumpered the cmos. The only way I can get some kind of reaction out of it is to remove the power on the graphics card which causes the speaker to screech.

I also get beeps if I remove all memory.

Apart from that, zilch.

Anyone have any ideas as its doing my nut in.

z
 
Cheers for that advice. I left the battery out when I left for work this morning but the power cable was still in. Anyway, no difference.

I've now unplugged the power chord and will give it a whirl later on. If I knew it was definetly the motherboard, I'd have RMA'd it. All I want is some beeps to indicate where the issue but all I'm getting is the silent treatment.. damn thing. Maybe I need to show it some love one valentines day?

z
 
Ok, some developments.

I cranked out the 1gb memory chips out of slots 3 and 4 and put one of them into slot 1. Don't ask me why I did this, call it a hunch.

Anyway, the PC kicked into life and prompted me which bios configuration options to boot up with (last known, etc.).

It then went all the way into Vista. I've now shutdown and put another 1gb in and rebooted. Vista sorta struggled and the monitor went off. I wasn't paying attention so I'm not sure what happened. I rebooted and went all the way into vista.

I'm now running memtest to see if it brings up anything. What I really should be doing is backing up my data!

Anyway, I've no idea what's going on. Is it dodgy memory (again) or something else. I hope something isn't killing my memory every few months.

I've also just noticed that there are some new bios's out there for the motherboard. I'm still on the F7 bios.

Further news as and when I get it.

z
 

Ok, looks like a memory chip issue. Have tried the 4 x 1Gb in the 4 ddr2 slots and this is what I get.

The 1234 below is the slot no. excluding the ddr3 (slot 1 being the closest to the cpu). abcd uniquely identifies a memory chip. A blank in a column indicates slot empty.

1 2 3 4 Outcome
------- -------------
a b c - Nothing
a b - d Beeps
a b d - Beeps
a d - - Nothing
a c - - Nothing
c - - - Nothing
d - - - Nothing
- d - - Nothing
- c - - Nothing
- - - c Nothing
- - b - Boots up ok
- - - b Boots up ok
- - a - Boots up ok
- - a b Boots up ok
c - a b Nothing
- c a b Nothing
d c a b Nothing
d c - - Nothing
a b - - Ok


Based on the above, it looks like chips 'c' and 'd' are giving me trouble as I'm unable to boot if I have them in any configuration.

I also had to revert to disabling the CPU power saving within the bios to maintain stability in vista.

As I can't boot using the above suspicious chips, I am unable to run a memtest against them.

Have I missed anything?

z
 
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Not sure if anyone is following my saga with the pc but the competitor has confirmed that the memory is faulty.

So, either I'm dead unlucky or I've managed to kill 3 sticks of ballistix ram.. doesn't really instill much confidence.

z
 
Well I got my replacement RAM today and everything is fine.

If it is some kind of compatibility issue, surely it wouldn't just kill the memory sticks. Unless it is some kind of black widow?

I'll keep an eye on things - still have around 5mths warranty left on the sticks.

Am half tempted to flash the bios with the new firmware. Except I ain't that brave.

z
 
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