PC Won't start up!!!

Lonz · 29 Jan 2006 at 19:17

OK, I went to a friends house for a LAN and had to take my PC with me. When I got it there, it wouldn't boot up correctly, it would reach the Detecting IDE drives, detect them, then go to a blank screen. After a few reboots the PC started up as normal eventually for some strange reason and didn't have other problems with it during the night.

However, when I brought it home, I had another problem. I wire everything up again, then hit the boot button. Then all the components light up but then the motherboard speaker starts beeping continuously at 1 second intervals. The only way to shut it up is to give it a bash and/or switch it off.

I can't help but think its my RAM that is causing the problem, which I taken out and replaced in the same slots to double check for lose connections. But when on boot up, they merely have the middle orange light on, then go all on as if everything was OK, then go down to just the one green light.

If I do the slightest change, like take all the power off, remove a RAM chip then put it back in again, I seem to get a different boot up each time. Sometimes I have got the BIOS screen and managed to reset the BIOS, and even got it to run safe mode. But when safe mode started running, the system hung and I had to reboot.

Any help on why my PC is doing this and what I can do to fix it would be fantastic

Thanks
Alex

p.s. my system spec:

AMD 3800+ w/. Asus Star ice
2x 1GB Corsair XMS3200 CL2
ATI 256MB X850XT PE
Asus SLi-Deluxe Motherboard

Lonz · 29 Jan 2006 at 19:32

Phoenix if I remember rightly

Lonz · 29 Jan 2006 at 19:57

Hmmmm it seems that my graphics card power cable was slightly lose. However, when I put the case panel back on, I pulled it out again while windows was loading. Now it won't bot up again

Is my GFX card dead?

Lonz · 29 Jan 2006 at 20:10

kbc, I can now not see anything. It seems that the PC prefers to boot without the graphics card in.

With the graphics card in, the onemiddle RAM light comes on on each RAM stick and then just goes off with the PC not taking any further action

Lonz · 29 Jan 2006 at 20:21

Rob43 said:
you may want to run Memtest to check the memory,that will tell you if it's the ram.Is the card getting power,fan spinning ?

Rob

Its 99.9% the graphics card at fault now. The fan is spinning etc. But with the graphics card in, the RAM doesn't seem to want to play game. If i take the graphics card out, the RAM lights exactly as I would expect it to on a normal startup.

Lonz · 29 Jan 2006 at 22:15

I don't have another PCI-E video card unfortunately.

After a few reboots, 1/10 times I get to the Windows login screen, but all of the USB devices fail to respond. Like the keyboard and mouse etc. This thing seems to have a mind of its own.

Once or twice the I get the BIOS screen up, but they don't detect the IDE drives, but most of the time I just get the Middle orange light on the RAM and nothing happens after they go off.

I would just like to add, I'm not getting any beeps atm.

Lonz · 29 Jan 2006 at 22:33

I can't get that far on boot-up unfortunately.

Lonz · 30 Jan 2006 at 16:39

I've done that as well but its still ******. it seems to boot when it feels like it. This morning I managed to get windows working perfectly, then I turned it off, came back 10 mins later and it wouldn't boot again.

No swearing, read the FAQ.

Otacon