PC freezes on BIOS and Windows... what is the problem?

[Integraoligist]

Hi all,
I've had this Abit mobo, AMD 1.4ghz processor, 256mb Kingston ram running for about 3 years now. Never had a problem with it.

Last week one of my 2 DVD drives decided to stop Ejecting the tray... i figure it was old and just craped out (like 5-7 years i believe). 2 days ago I come in and see a black screen, would not wake-up. I hit reset, and nothing, no signal to the monitor. I had to hold down power to turn her off... waited... and started again... ran through the BIOS and goto the RAID controllers, and stalled. Had to manually turn off and on again... this time it went though and Windows came up.

I figured maybe the DVD drive would be screwing something up so I took it out and re arranged the internals... formatted Windows and reinstalled everything.

Everything was running smooth, no problems, until this morning, I turn it on then BIOS detects the drives then Keyboard then mouse then stalls. Had to manual shutoff then on again... went though the bios and RAID controllers then before starting Windows it stalls with a cursor on a black screen.

I let it sit for about 4 hours, and now it's running normaly again.

Ideas what the problem is?
Sorry for the long post but I wanted to get all the info I could for you all!

Thanks!
J

 

[Integraoligist]

well, 10 seconds after i posted the above... the PC Froze again.
I hit reset and nothing came up... no signal to the monitor, but the hdd LED stays solid red.
I hit reset again, does the same thing... I turn it off/on manualy and now it's fine.

thoughts?

Also, I was thinking maybe the P/S? I've had it for about 4 years and it's 500W... is that the usual "life" for a P/S? But then again, why would it freeze everything and just not shutdown completely?

Thanks again all!

 

[jeremy]

must be the psu or mobo , get into pc health/hardware monitoring in the bios write the voltages on paper and report back , also check mobo for bad capacitors (better do it with a flashlight) see examples
http://home.earthlink.net/~doniteli/index27.htm
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=195
if youll find bad capacitors then have em replaced at some electronic repair shop it wouldnt cost much

 

[Integraoligist]

i checked the PC Health:
CPU 127F
System 80F
VCore 1.79V
3.3V 3.42V
5V 4.83V
12V 12.12V

I did'nt have time to check the mobo for the cap's yet.... but how is the PSU doing?

Thanks!

 

[jeremy]

cpu is temp is pretty good although you can make it drop around 10 degrees with better cooling , the +5v is a bit low but stable , must be the mobo :amazed:

 

[Integraoligist]

well, i could'nt get it to boot past the bios screen... but was able to get into the bios and change settings to "failsafe mode"... after doing then and getting it to boot to the bios again (i'd say 3 minutes of hitting the reset button) the bios came on and said "CPU UNWORKABLE OR CHANGED..."

took the tower out and took the RAM STICK out, blew on it... wiped the contact points off... blew into the holder... reinstalled... restarted and BIOS came right up, again with the "CPU UNWORKABLE OR CHANGED...", went into bios and changed to "LOAD OPTIMIZED SETTINGS"... restarted and now everythings working normaly.

WTF? dust on the RAM caused all of this?
I'll give it some time and see if it happens again....

 

[Nitestick]

run memtest86+ as well. it would seem this has fixed your problem but still give it a run