Strange Booting issue, help!

Mr C

Mr C

Mr C

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8 Sep 2006
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Over the last month I seem to have encountered an issue with getting my pc to boot.

If it is turned off and left off for an extended time (6 hours +) it will fail to boot when next turned on.

It will turn on as usual and then when detecting IDE drives stall, if it passes that phase as it does sometimes it will freeze on the "boot from cd/dvd" page and return a hard disk check error press ctrl alt del to restart. If it passes that phase it will definitely freeze on the windows loading screen.

If it is left running on the frozen page for a few minutes and restarted the pc will boot without any issues. Also if I restart or shut down the pc and then turn it back on without leaving it for the extended time it will also start perfectly.

So far I have swapped in and out the following components:

RAM
CMOS Battery
GFX Card
Sound Card
CD/DVD Drive

I have formatted and clean installed the hard drive, none of the above fixed the problem even though it may have booted once or twice before the initial problem resurfaces. I have removed any previous Overclocks I was running and unplugged and re-seated almost everything except the CPU.

I'm assuming the next thing to swap would be hard drive since that's the only error I seem to be getting back but I have run a handful of hard drive checks and none have reported any issues with it.

Finally once the pc is booted it runs perfectly with no errors in event viewer and no crashes at any time.

Current spec is:

Intel i7 920
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5
6 GB (3x2) OCZ Gold PC3 12800
Sapphire HD 7950
Western Digital Black 500 GB
Coolermaster Silent pro 700 w PSU

All components above except the GFX card are just over 5 years old.

Any help appreciated on what I should be aiming to change next.
 
are you overclocked at all? can you pop in the bios and see how much qpi/vtt and dram voltage your using?
 
I've had similar issues and these have tended to be as a result of configuring RAID over all raid ports and having SATA devices plugged into those RAID ports when not meant to be part of the RAID. That's because the RAID ports on the ASUS are split into two banks where RAID is setup as RAID 5 across all 6 ports or if using RAID 0/4/5 then only across ports 1-4.

The other reason I got the same type of issue was have a USB device plugged in and the system intermittently tries to boot into it. Remove and try it if you have it.
 
No overclock, "optimised defaults" from motherboard since I swapped the CMOS battery.

Vcore at 1.22500
Qpi/vtt voltage at 1.200
Dram at 1.500

All settings are set to "Auto" as per optimised defaults.

There's no USB devices for it to attempt to boot to and all the IDE ports were all switched to NONE except the hard drive and CD/DVD ones so it doesn't even check for them during POST, so I don't think its any RAID setup either.
 
that ram is usually rated at 1.65v,so manually set dram voltage to 1.66v in the bios

and set qpi/vtt voltage manually to 1.32v

then see if it still plays up from a cold boot
 
Download a handful of HDD checking software, like CrystalDiskInfo etc, and see if they show errors on the drive.

CPU heatsink free of dust? How long has the same thermal paste been under there, 5 years? Sometimes cleaning and replacing (and re-seating CPU) can help a bit with booting issues. Got some more life out of an old droid with a similar issue that way.
 
are you on f12 bios?

tried with 1.35v qpi/vtt?

could be hdd or bios detection bug idk but try above first
 
Bios is up to date and I have already ran several disk checking programs to find any errors on the drive but none have been found and the event viewer is clean indicating that there is no problems under load or idle whilst it is running. It is just the first time on booting since its off for a while.

I tried upping the voltage to 1.35 but it rebooted on start-up and set the voltages back to default, so could it possibly be a PSU or Motherboard issue?
 
i would hazard a guess your motherboard may be the cause of your cold boot issue, maybe a contact somewhere is not making correctly until it has warmed a little.

Try getting a hair-dryer and run some warm air over the motherboard for a few mins see if you still get the same "cold" boot issue once there has been some warm air circulated in the case.
 
Gunda said:
i would hazard a guess your motherboard may be the cause of your cold boot issue, maybe a contact somewhere is not making correctly until it has warmed a little.

Try getting a hair-dryer and run some warm air over the motherboard for a few mins see if you still get the same "cold" boot issue once there has been some warm air circulated in the case.
Click to expand...

This is exactly the case as I just tried warming the motherboard with a hairdryer and it booted first time perfectly.

So now what would be the best method to permanently fix this? Is there any way of finding out which contact is the culprit and would it just be a case of touching it up with a soldering iron to repair it?
 
How old is your motherboard? are you not able to RMA it? Other than that, maybe try taking the board out of the case clean it with some compressed air? eyeball the back of it see if there is anything obvious you can see?

Don't go touching anything with a soldering iron you'll end up doing more damage than good if you don't have proper heat sinks etc for the chip legs.
 
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