Zotac 9300 GE hangs at bios splash screen

Destination · 27 Dec 2009 at 15:34

Zotac 9300 GE hangs at bios splash screen, zotac brand logo, prior to POST, no beeps etc, any suggestions on basic troubleshooting?

I think everything is firmly attached, but I am 30 miles from the PC and my father isn't remotely technically minded.

It was running fine afaik, then the machine hung within windows and now fails to boot correctly.

After being left off for 20minutes the machine now boots fine and appears to be running smoothly. I am certain it will experience the same issues again.

I've been naughty and crossposted as I placed the inital post in the wrong forum section. Hopefulyl it'll be read here.

Indy500 · 27 Dec 2009 at 15:36

Sounds like memory or hard drive fault?

Destination · 2 Jan 2010 at 11:52

Okay so I removed the box from my folks place, brought it back to my own for testing, and I can't replicate the fault. It seems to be running perfectly.
Memtest checks out, HD tets check out, FPS test checks out, CPU burn checks out.
I am bewildered, the only hard ware difference is I am now using a standard usb mouse and keyboard as opposed to their logitech wireless keybpard and mouse set that work from one of those wireless dongle things.

Could that have been causing lockups at BIOS level or causing the machine to report a lockup fault related at GFX level?

The only thing that windows is reporting is that display driver has stopped working on 3 occasions since the machine was built, this could coincident with the lockups, but odd i can't replicate it now. Drivers are fully up to date etc.

Spooter · 2 Jan 2010 at 17:13

Hi Hikari,

Have you tried any overclocking on your board ITX board? Maybe you can help with the below post I made.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18095319

Destination · 3 Jan 2010 at 16:27

Sorry no overclock, just utter bewilderment at the possibility of a logitech usb keyboard being responsible for intermittent lockups, if indeed that is what the cause was.
Yet to identify any other possible cause.

Destination · 12 Jan 2010 at 20:33

Right now I've been able to test this box again, when it is at my house and setup I can't make it crash under any circumstances.
At my folks house, now using identical peripherals the machine will simply stop, freeze, screen is maintained and nothing works at all, hard drive activity light sticks 'on'.
Then on a hard reboot, it will somtimes hang at the zotac splash screen, and sometimes reboot to windows directly.

Has anyone the remotest clue what on earth could be causing this? memory seems to pass memtest, burn tests don't lead to overtemps or lockups, check disk comes thru as fine also.