Hi,

Does anybody have any suggestions regarding the following:

My PC hangs or powers down at various (seemingly random) points during bootup. It can hang at any point, and sometimes does not even get as far as POST (or any video signal at all). It does, huwever, always get as far as lighting up the HD LED, and this always stays active once the system has locked/restarted/gone off. Sometimes it kicks out a BIOS checksum error or stops recognising some of the HDs. In the end (after between 1 and 20 reboots) it always gets there. Once the system is up and running, it hardly ever goes down again.
I have lived with this for a while because just when I can hardly take any more, it seems to sort itself out and runs faultlessly for a few months.
Last time it was really bad, I ended up putting in a new (old) power supply, and that seemed to help at the time. I have tried various components in a different system (including memory, graphics cards and drives), and could not find a culprit. I haven't tried the whole system on a different motherboard, as XP wouldn't let me....

I am pretty certain that this is NOT a software/OS issue, because, as I have said, it sometimes doesn't even get as far as the beeps or POST.

I am about ready to start random purchases of power supplies, memory and IDE cables in the hope of stumbling upon an answer....

Hello Ben,

Welcome to PCHF, sorry for the delay here.

It's definately a hardware problem. Could anything, hardware wise have been changed or *added* to have caused this problem?

To be honest monkey, it sounds like a power supply problem to me...

Ben, (welcome to the pchf), can you please try removing unnecessary things such as your cd/dvd drive(s) and any extra hard drives...leave only 1 stick of memory installed and remove every card except your video card.

Run like this for only a short period...say 30 minutes...if it hangs, this is not likely to be your problem (unless the PSU is faulty). If it doesn't hang....that's likely to be the cause

Yeah GaRHaR, that why I asked if anything had been added. It sounds like he doesn't have enough power doesn't it?

"great minds think alike....fools rarely differ..."


Certainly does