A few days ago my machine failed to boot. No POST, just fans, power LED, HDD LED, and disc drive spinning.
Today I troubleshooted. I unhooked the DVD drive, nothing. I took out all the memory except for one stick. Still nothing. I moved the single stick around and it eventually booted. I figured I had either a bad stick or a bad slot. I swapped a stick I knew worked into the questionable slot and it again failed to boot. So, bad slot, right?
I hooked the DVD drive back up, populated the 3 other memory slots and booted. It took a really long time for Windows to boot - so long that I thought it had failed a few times and cycled. I again unhooked the DVD drive. Things seem to be better, but I did have a random power off. I'm typing this on the machine I've been having issues with, so for now it's working. Also, instead of the normal BIOS screen, I was getting some other screen at boot that made me press F2 to accept default BIOS settings. I don't really have a great idea of why or when that was happening.
Any ideas? My thought is I might have a PSU that's ready to go. I've swapped components over the years, but have kept the same power supply - a 620W Corsair that's probably 6-7 years old by now. Does that seem to be the likely offender?
Virus scans are coming up clean, although the initial no POST and subsequent fixes seem to eliminate that possibility. I've recently installed VMWare Player, but that's about the only significant system change.
Any help is much appreciated! Specs follow:
ASUS M4A88T-A motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 935
10 GB of RAM currently (2, 4 & 4) - Initially I had 6 GB in it (2, 2 & 2)
Corsair 620W PSU
Nvidia 460 GPU
Today I troubleshooted. I unhooked the DVD drive, nothing. I took out all the memory except for one stick. Still nothing. I moved the single stick around and it eventually booted. I figured I had either a bad stick or a bad slot. I swapped a stick I knew worked into the questionable slot and it again failed to boot. So, bad slot, right?
I hooked the DVD drive back up, populated the 3 other memory slots and booted. It took a really long time for Windows to boot - so long that I thought it had failed a few times and cycled. I again unhooked the DVD drive. Things seem to be better, but I did have a random power off. I'm typing this on the machine I've been having issues with, so for now it's working. Also, instead of the normal BIOS screen, I was getting some other screen at boot that made me press F2 to accept default BIOS settings. I don't really have a great idea of why or when that was happening.
Any ideas? My thought is I might have a PSU that's ready to go. I've swapped components over the years, but have kept the same power supply - a 620W Corsair that's probably 6-7 years old by now. Does that seem to be the likely offender?
Virus scans are coming up clean, although the initial no POST and subsequent fixes seem to eliminate that possibility. I've recently installed VMWare Player, but that's about the only significant system change.
Any help is much appreciated! Specs follow:
ASUS M4A88T-A motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 935
10 GB of RAM currently (2, 4 & 4) - Initially I had 6 GB in it (2, 2 & 2)
Corsair 620W PSU
Nvidia 460 GPU