3/4 through boot I get 2 clicks, then black screen 1

[Righty]

I have a system with an ASUS P4B533, a 1.7 ghz celeron and 512 pc2100. I am running XP Pro. The system has been running great for a year. Then it locked up and I rebooted and since then it will get to the "black" windows XP screen with the three blue dots going across screen and I hear two clicks from what seems the motherboard or processor and the screen goes black and it stops booting. Or I will get to XP scandisk and it checks the whole hard drive and says it is ok then freezes. If I go to "safe Mode" it gets down to the AGP440 file and stops. I have replaced the Power Supply, Video Card and RAM. I have also disconnected everything else. I do get "Power on self test complete, computer now booting from operating system" from motherboard. Then when it gets to that black XP screen I hear the 2 clicks and it goes blank. Any ideas???

 

[sbaker899]

The two clicks sound like they would be coming from the hard drive - some drives make these as they begin to spin up (i.e. when booting or coming out of standby for example). Perhaps this is where you need to be looking for your problem?

 

[Righty]

I had run two of the low end diagnostics tests from Western digital and they passed. Plus I had the dard drive outside the box (connected) and the clicks were coming from inside the box around the motherboard and Processor

 

[smah]

I had something very similar to this that was caused by the power supply. I know that you've replaced the PS, but based on my experience, it deserves another attempt.

In my case, the machine would just reboot at the moment it tried to display the windows desktop. I also got the 'clicking' which by the time I got the problem solved, had increased to 6, 8 or maybe even 10 clicks per incident. I believe this is some relay or switching device turning off and on. The mobo was an AMD based Gigabyte. I don't remember what the video card was. After having this occur when I could invesigate thoroughly, I found that the +5V output of the PS tended to be quite low. When it was really low, this click/reboot would occur. It seemed to happen when the +5V output got to around 4.7V. My suspicion was that the windows loading screen was probably 640 X 480 resolution and a rather low frequency. When the desktop was initializing, the video card was switching to something like 1280 X 1024 @ 75 Hz and this drew enough power to make the PS hiccup. In any event, a new PS was the ultimate cure. If you can get into the bios, see if the actual voltages are displayed somewhere, and see how close they actually are compared to what they should be.

 

[bcastner]

If you are positive the two clicks come from inside the box and not the monitor, then I think smah has nailed this issue.

If the clicks are coming from the monitor, replace it.

 

[Righty]

I ran a repair of Windows XP Pro and it seems to work. I still get a clicking sound when it is booting up, but it continues to boot. It does seem a litttle slower on bootup. After I get the Black XP screen the video goes away, the monitor light blinks and then it comes back on after about 5 - 10 seconds to the blue welcome screen an boots up ok from there. But I will watch the Power Supply ratings in setup. Thanks.