After spending many hours perusing various threads on numerous sites I find myself no further on troubleshooting the following boot problem. The PC will not boot from cold, but will work perfectly after a hard reset. Apologies in advance for this massive post, but it will prevent exploring places I have explored already. I built the following system for my son for Christmas:
ABIT NF8 V2 mb
AMD Sempron 3000+ Boxed with fan
single stick 512 mb Kingston DDR 400 Memory
ATI Radeon 9550 256 mb video card
Sony DVD drive
Single Western Digital WD800 JD 7200 rpm SATA 80 gb HDD
Zoom G-Wireless USB 54 mbs card
TV 2000XP global TV tuner card PCI
LG 1917S TFT monitor.
350W PSU with 19V on the 12V rail
Windows XP home
On first assembly everything booted up and worked fine. The following day – on a cold boot, the system hung before/during POST. No single (normal) beep and fans were turning and both HDD and DVD drive lights came on. The reset button did not have any effect. A couple of hard power-offs did the trick - system booted into windows fine. Again the following day on a cold start, the system hung but I had a couple of different POST codes at different times:
Two tone siren – short beeps, repeating longer beep (about 1 sec long) but did not self shut down – just continued with the beeping until I switched the power off (reset had no effect)
On investigating various web sites/threads I decided on replacing the PSU (two tone beeps – out of limit voltage detection and on looking on ABIT TEQ the 3.3V rail was a bit unstable (about 6-7%) I also increased AGP and Vcore voltages by small amounts as recommended on the Abit Forum threads but no improvement. I replaced the PSU with a Jeantech 600W unit)
Bet you can guess though – New PSU did not help.
I have since done three clean installs of windows and formatted the HDD to try to eliminate virus/driver snags. Incidentally, on the windows install – the soft reboots initiated by windows setup resulted in single repeated beeps and system hangs. Hard power off and reboot again enabled a normal boot back into windows.
Other threads suggest that the single repeating beep is not a terminal main board problem and I suspected the CMOS battery – not enough juice to store the configuration – hence the hanging on cold boot but changing it has not helped either. I have also swapped RAM and graphics card ( ATI radeon 9600XT) from my other PC to eliminate those components as suspect. Also tried running the RAM as 333 rather than 400 - Symptoms remained each time.
I then noticed that the DVD rom was not always recognised in the BIOS and so suspected an IDE channel failure. After discussion with tech support people at ABIT I then RMAed the motherboard and replaced it for an ASUS K8V X SE.
Since fitting the ASUS board the only remaining problem is that the PC will still not boot first time from cold. You have to do a hard reset and then it boots fine and runs very well into windows. I have now been investigating threads about the WD800JD hard drive and its compatibility with the VT8237R chipset. I have jumpered the HDD to lock at 150mb/s. Have also swapped in a different DVD drive but no change.
I am left with thinking that this is a BIOS setting issue or a SATA/IDE conflict or BOOT issue. I have tried play with boot order and the RAID screen but there appears to be nothing to change there. I have also flashed the BIOS to 1015 from the ASUS web site. I have checked for motherboard shorts – seems clear.
I am also thinking of getting an EIDE HDD just to see if this is the problem but can't see why SATA shouldn’t run with IDE on the same board?
So far I have:
Changed PSU twice
Changed the mainboard
Swapped in RAM
Swapped in Graphics Card
Changed GPU fan supply source
Changed CMOS battery
Changed voltages in the bios at the advice of the tech support man in UK
Run various software based hardware checks eg PC Check 5.65 and memtest 86+ which have all passed.
Sorry 'bout the war and peace but having read many threads, it seems to pay to be thorough... I really am starting struggle with this one. Any help would be gratefully received…
Kev D
ABIT NF8 V2 mb
AMD Sempron 3000+ Boxed with fan
single stick 512 mb Kingston DDR 400 Memory
ATI Radeon 9550 256 mb video card
Sony DVD drive
Single Western Digital WD800 JD 7200 rpm SATA 80 gb HDD
Zoom G-Wireless USB 54 mbs card
TV 2000XP global TV tuner card PCI
LG 1917S TFT monitor.
350W PSU with 19V on the 12V rail
Windows XP home
On first assembly everything booted up and worked fine. The following day – on a cold boot, the system hung before/during POST. No single (normal) beep and fans were turning and both HDD and DVD drive lights came on. The reset button did not have any effect. A couple of hard power-offs did the trick - system booted into windows fine. Again the following day on a cold start, the system hung but I had a couple of different POST codes at different times:
Two tone siren – short beeps, repeating longer beep (about 1 sec long) but did not self shut down – just continued with the beeping until I switched the power off (reset had no effect)
On investigating various web sites/threads I decided on replacing the PSU (two tone beeps – out of limit voltage detection and on looking on ABIT TEQ the 3.3V rail was a bit unstable (about 6-7%) I also increased AGP and Vcore voltages by small amounts as recommended on the Abit Forum threads but no improvement. I replaced the PSU with a Jeantech 600W unit)
Bet you can guess though – New PSU did not help.
I have since done three clean installs of windows and formatted the HDD to try to eliminate virus/driver snags. Incidentally, on the windows install – the soft reboots initiated by windows setup resulted in single repeated beeps and system hangs. Hard power off and reboot again enabled a normal boot back into windows.
Other threads suggest that the single repeating beep is not a terminal main board problem and I suspected the CMOS battery – not enough juice to store the configuration – hence the hanging on cold boot but changing it has not helped either. I have also swapped RAM and graphics card ( ATI radeon 9600XT) from my other PC to eliminate those components as suspect. Also tried running the RAM as 333 rather than 400 - Symptoms remained each time.
I then noticed that the DVD rom was not always recognised in the BIOS and so suspected an IDE channel failure. After discussion with tech support people at ABIT I then RMAed the motherboard and replaced it for an ASUS K8V X SE.
Since fitting the ASUS board the only remaining problem is that the PC will still not boot first time from cold. You have to do a hard reset and then it boots fine and runs very well into windows. I have now been investigating threads about the WD800JD hard drive and its compatibility with the VT8237R chipset. I have jumpered the HDD to lock at 150mb/s. Have also swapped in a different DVD drive but no change.
I am left with thinking that this is a BIOS setting issue or a SATA/IDE conflict or BOOT issue. I have tried play with boot order and the RAID screen but there appears to be nothing to change there. I have also flashed the BIOS to 1015 from the ASUS web site. I have checked for motherboard shorts – seems clear.
I am also thinking of getting an EIDE HDD just to see if this is the problem but can't see why SATA shouldn’t run with IDE on the same board?
So far I have:
Changed PSU twice
Changed the mainboard
Swapped in RAM
Swapped in Graphics Card
Changed GPU fan supply source
Changed CMOS battery
Changed voltages in the bios at the advice of the tech support man in UK
Run various software based hardware checks eg PC Check 5.65 and memtest 86+ which have all passed.
Sorry 'bout the war and peace but having read many threads, it seems to pay to be thorough... I really am starting struggle with this one. Any help would be gratefully received…
Kev D