Hi,
My PC stopped booting... I wonder if anyone out there'll have any ideas. It's an old PC and I'd be reluctant to change it as it worked well for me (and cash flow is limited at the moment)
I will try to give all the background so the story is a bit longish. I might err on the side of providing some irrelevant info...
The PC is several years old Athlon XP 1600+ system with a K7S5A motherboard.
512MB DDR RAM.
160GB Drive (I think Seagate).
nvidia 4600Ti based MCI video card.
SoundBlaster Live
CDROM
DLink ethernet card
Few months ago I added a DVD burner. It all worked fine until one day while burning a dvd the power supply just died (-should have thought of that -doh 300W is I guess not enough).
I borrowed a 400W PSU from stock room at work while new one (430W) was in the mail (and then kept running the borrowed one for about 2 weeks with my new one beside the pc in the box )
About a week ago my SoundBlaster basically died - the sound quality became terrible- sounded like a blown speaker. Then one or two total locks happened when I tired playing something. I took the SB out and turned on (in BIOS) the on-board sound card which worked nicely - no system locks, playback ok (I had SB in the first place because drivers for on board card ware not available for linux few years back)
Few days ago I started having more issues with the system.
The most worrisome was at booting. After power on the LEDs on the CD and DVD and the hdd LED would get turned on for a second or two in a sequence. Several seconds would than pass and LEDs would repeat the sequence. This would keep happening for 30s-1min. Screen was black through that time. Eventually: one beep, memcheck etc... - normal boot would proceed. This seemed erratic - sometimes normal boot would get under way immediatelly after one disk check sequence, which was normal behavior before.
In recent days I noticed more program hangs than usual (I run linux on the pc - such things are really really rare normally.) (the high frequency I am talking about is maybe 2-3 times something would crash in a course of several hours). I got two kernel panics on booting - I should have noted down the messages but didn't - I couldn't really parse what these were saying.
So I thought ok let's put the new PSU in - can't hurt.
I put it in and now can't boot at all. (Power is there -CPU fan on)
The disk check sequence continues indefinitelly. Black screen. One more thing I noticed is that the ethernet card drops link and reestablishes it a moment later at one point in the sequence. It's like an infinite loop - spin disks, ethernet link down, up , repeat.
I thought - maybe loose connection. I reseated everything except the CPU. RAM, cards, IDE connectors. - same thing happened.
I started unplugging stuff:
CD DVD - disk check sequence stopped hdd led came on,than off but I think it didn't blink again.
unplugged hdd - didn't help - black screen, no beep.
ethernet - nope.
video card - I expected complaints beeps etc - nothing happened.
unplugged RAM - mobo should complain no? - nothing: no beep at all.
One thing I didn't do is reset CMOS. For quite a while battery was dead on the mobo which I just never could find 10 minutes to replace (time was always wrong once in a while settings would get reset) I'll try to put a new battery tomorrow and reset but I doubt it should help.
One thing that works is the soft power off - holding down the power button on the front for few seconds shuts off the power as normally.
Out of ideas.
My worry is that the old power supply damaged something on mobo while dying. But then I don't understand why the system worked fine for 2-3 weeks after that.
Memory problem is possible (consistent with programs hanging) but then why doesn't mobo complain with no video card and memory in it?
Could it be mobo dying of old age with accidental correlation to the psu dying?
Any insight would be very welcome.
thanks,
Wojtek
My PC stopped booting... I wonder if anyone out there'll have any ideas. It's an old PC and I'd be reluctant to change it as it worked well for me (and cash flow is limited at the moment)
I will try to give all the background so the story is a bit longish. I might err on the side of providing some irrelevant info...
The PC is several years old Athlon XP 1600+ system with a K7S5A motherboard.
512MB DDR RAM.
160GB Drive (I think Seagate).
nvidia 4600Ti based MCI video card.
SoundBlaster Live
CDROM
DLink ethernet card
Few months ago I added a DVD burner. It all worked fine until one day while burning a dvd the power supply just died (-should have thought of that -doh 300W is I guess not enough).
I borrowed a 400W PSU from stock room at work while new one (430W) was in the mail (and then kept running the borrowed one for about 2 weeks with my new one beside the pc in the box )
About a week ago my SoundBlaster basically died - the sound quality became terrible- sounded like a blown speaker. Then one or two total locks happened when I tired playing something. I took the SB out and turned on (in BIOS) the on-board sound card which worked nicely - no system locks, playback ok (I had SB in the first place because drivers for on board card ware not available for linux few years back)
Few days ago I started having more issues with the system.
The most worrisome was at booting. After power on the LEDs on the CD and DVD and the hdd LED would get turned on for a second or two in a sequence. Several seconds would than pass and LEDs would repeat the sequence. This would keep happening for 30s-1min. Screen was black through that time. Eventually: one beep, memcheck etc... - normal boot would proceed. This seemed erratic - sometimes normal boot would get under way immediatelly after one disk check sequence, which was normal behavior before.
In recent days I noticed more program hangs than usual (I run linux on the pc - such things are really really rare normally.) (the high frequency I am talking about is maybe 2-3 times something would crash in a course of several hours). I got two kernel panics on booting - I should have noted down the messages but didn't - I couldn't really parse what these were saying.
So I thought ok let's put the new PSU in - can't hurt.
I put it in and now can't boot at all. (Power is there -CPU fan on)
The disk check sequence continues indefinitelly. Black screen. One more thing I noticed is that the ethernet card drops link and reestablishes it a moment later at one point in the sequence. It's like an infinite loop - spin disks, ethernet link down, up , repeat.
I thought - maybe loose connection. I reseated everything except the CPU. RAM, cards, IDE connectors. - same thing happened.
I started unplugging stuff:
CD DVD - disk check sequence stopped hdd led came on,than off but I think it didn't blink again.
unplugged hdd - didn't help - black screen, no beep.
ethernet - nope.
video card - I expected complaints beeps etc - nothing happened.
unplugged RAM - mobo should complain no? - nothing: no beep at all.
One thing I didn't do is reset CMOS. For quite a while battery was dead on the mobo which I just never could find 10 minutes to replace (time was always wrong once in a while settings would get reset) I'll try to put a new battery tomorrow and reset but I doubt it should help.
One thing that works is the soft power off - holding down the power button on the front for few seconds shuts off the power as normally.
Out of ideas.
My worry is that the old power supply damaged something on mobo while dying. But then I don't understand why the system worked fine for 2-3 weeks after that.
Memory problem is possible (consistent with programs hanging) but then why doesn't mobo complain with no video card and memory in it?
Could it be mobo dying of old age with accidental correlation to the psu dying?
Any insight would be very welcome.
thanks,
Wojtek