Yet another Boot Up problem.....

[virtualranger]

Ok, put a new Gforce 4 card in my PC (a Microstar 6340 MoBo with an 800 AMD athlon) and it worked fine for a while (the odd freeze/glitch but nothin serious) then the PC literally just died on me.

Now whenever I re-boot it starts loading up, I get a video signal and the correct single beep, it gets to the f8 prompt (select normal or safe mode etc) then it just dies, almost like suspend mode. It wont continue to boot and the signal to the monitor goes. At this point the CPU fan is still going strong and power is still connected to all drives. I have tried all the following (not neccessarily in this order):

Tried installing everything in new case to improve cooling.
Tried a new 330W power supply.
Tried 3 different video cards in AGP and PCI slots.
Tried clearing CMOS.
Tried new memory.
Tried my CPU in different PC and it worked fine (although I havent tried a different CPU in this system).
Tried disconnecting all cards (except VGA) and disk drives - this time it boots to black screen with cursor (expected) but then same problem (i.e. shutdown) after same amount of time (aprox 20-25 secs).
Tried disconnecting all the case power leads (e.g the pwr button, reset button, speaker etc).

AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

Is it time to try a new MoBo? Any other suggestions greatly appreciated, I've really tried to help myself but have run into brick wall.

 

[dinosnake]

Does it go into, from the Windows Startup Menu, Command Prompt or Safe Mode Command Prompt modes?

Does it start up from a floppy and give you a MSDOS C: prompt after doing so?

Disconnect the hard drive and try booting from the floppy if the boot-from-floppy test fails on the first attempt.

Make sure you completely disable power saving features in the BIOS.

Please let us know of the results!! Your mileage may vary...

 

[Cindy1]

Try stripping it and using only the cpu, m/b, power supply, memory, and hard drive. If that doesn't work put the hard drive on the secondary controller. If that doesn't work try a known good hard drive just to see if it will boot in normal mode. If it dies in safe mode then it's hardware. My 1st guess maybe hard drive.
Just a thought,
Keep us posted,
Cindy

 

[virtualranger]

I'll give those suggestions a try and get back to you. Thanks.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I'd guess you didn't fully remove the old graphics card drivers before installing the new ones. Was the old card an ATI, by any chance?
CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[virtualranger]

No it was a Vanta TNT2 64, but i did have problems with the drivers. It used to freeze sometimes but this is different, it just seems to power down the monitor. But how the heck do I resolve it? I cant boot to anything as the power down occurs after about 20 seconds or so. Have tried all the other suggestions above but still no joy.

 

[ceh4702]

I have seen video cards cause the screen and the text to bothe be black and you just see nothing but the video card is working. My voodoo3 3000 use to do this. Usually I had to go to safe mode and change the background to the default green windows background and it would boot up. Also try changing the video settings to the lowest possible for your oper syst. 640 X 480 ??. What happens when you go to safe mode?

Always set the video card to the lowest setting before removing. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[virtualranger]

Sorry, perhaps I should explain, I cant boot to safe mode as when the prompt comes up (or sometimes sooner) the monitor goes off.
It first quotes also has a splash screen from the manufacturer and I'm not sure what button to press to get it into bios (have tried f12,f8,del etc). But in any case, even if I were to get it into bios it would power off b4 i had a chance to do anything. I think it is set to only boot from C: in the bios as it wont boot from floopy either. Am I sucppered? Can I flash the bios if it wont boot from floppy? Would it make a difference anyway?

 

[virtualranger]

Problem solved.

As it was cutting out at slightly different intervals I gathered it must be cooling problem (plus I'd tried almost everything else!). Stuck a huge desk fan pointing at the cpu and hey presto it booted and stayed on for much longer.
Put in a new (larger) heatsink and the problem is solved. The previous heatsink seemed to be working fine and was the correct type. Maybe the heat sink compound just wasnt doing its job properly.

It so happened that the overheating problem coincided with the install of new graphics card, so it wasnt the graphic card at all.

Just thought you might like to know.