Dingadilly
Baseband Member
- Messages
- 37
I posted a while back about a friend's PC which would no longer boot due to its system drive becoming apparently unreadable.
I swapped the disc in question out into 2 seperate working systems, it crashed both.
Could not load the recovery options from the vista DVD,
Could not acces recovery using a stripped down recovery only cd.
Tried using a LInux boot disc, crashed.
Couldn't get sufficient access to the disk to run any kind of scans or command prompts.
Finally gave up, tried freezing and "tapping" the drive as a last ditch.
Dead. data lost. New drive purchased, Vista reinstalled. Case closed.
Then it emerged that she had been having a problem for quite a while where every so often the system would hang during boot up (windows loading bar) She was powering off, hard restart to recover. We decided that by doing this over the course of a couple of years could well have been the reason that caused such corruption/damage to the original hdd.
The system is now repeating the same problem.
Power button pressed, system begins to boot and either: boots normally, or hangs at a black screen, no loading bar, No BIOS beeps, Monitor will be as black as if a "no signal" had occurred. It will stay like that indefinetley (tested overnight)
Asus P53Q -Wifi
WD Caviar Black 500gb (new since hdd failed)
Sapphire 6670 (new since hdd failed) Asus 3450 previously.
BIOS running on default settings, (except for disabling the none existant A:\ drive)
No further info (I'd be guessing and thats not helpful)
I'll need to get the rest of her specs at a later date to post here.
The problem has survived a full software reinstall, which leads me to believe it almost has to be hardware related. Yet it persists over 2 different video cards, 2 different hdds, numerous cable swaps, changed both power and data leads, switched from vga to dvi feeds etc. I've switched out her monitor with one of my own just to make sure it wasnt that.
Whilst I would consider drivers as a possible problem source, the above kinda rules them out.
I'm only left with the PSU, memory or the mobo itself as a cause.
Memtest is being run currently.
I'd expect to see a wide array of weird, strange behavior if there motherboard itself was knackered. System runs normally once booted. It's just this intermittent failure to boot.
Power is something I need to look at. Pretty sure she has a 500+ psu but I honestly can't remember.
I'm also going to move her video card to the other PCI-e slot, incase there is a fault with the top slot.
I will update the post with more info once I have it.
I guess I'm asking if anyone has any ideas what could cause this intermittent boot failure?
Especially considering that the Windows installation, the hdd, the video card, the monitor and associated cables have all been changed.
Many thanks.
Ding
I swapped the disc in question out into 2 seperate working systems, it crashed both.
Could not load the recovery options from the vista DVD,
Could not acces recovery using a stripped down recovery only cd.
Tried using a LInux boot disc, crashed.
Couldn't get sufficient access to the disk to run any kind of scans or command prompts.
Finally gave up, tried freezing and "tapping" the drive as a last ditch.
Dead. data lost. New drive purchased, Vista reinstalled. Case closed.
Then it emerged that she had been having a problem for quite a while where every so often the system would hang during boot up (windows loading bar) She was powering off, hard restart to recover. We decided that by doing this over the course of a couple of years could well have been the reason that caused such corruption/damage to the original hdd.
The system is now repeating the same problem.
Power button pressed, system begins to boot and either: boots normally, or hangs at a black screen, no loading bar, No BIOS beeps, Monitor will be as black as if a "no signal" had occurred. It will stay like that indefinetley (tested overnight)
Asus P53Q -Wifi
WD Caviar Black 500gb (new since hdd failed)
Sapphire 6670 (new since hdd failed) Asus 3450 previously.
BIOS running on default settings, (except for disabling the none existant A:\ drive)
No further info (I'd be guessing and thats not helpful)
I'll need to get the rest of her specs at a later date to post here.
The problem has survived a full software reinstall, which leads me to believe it almost has to be hardware related. Yet it persists over 2 different video cards, 2 different hdds, numerous cable swaps, changed both power and data leads, switched from vga to dvi feeds etc. I've switched out her monitor with one of my own just to make sure it wasnt that.
Whilst I would consider drivers as a possible problem source, the above kinda rules them out.
I'm only left with the PSU, memory or the mobo itself as a cause.
Memtest is being run currently.
I'd expect to see a wide array of weird, strange behavior if there motherboard itself was knackered. System runs normally once booted. It's just this intermittent failure to boot.
Power is something I need to look at. Pretty sure she has a 500+ psu but I honestly can't remember.
I'm also going to move her video card to the other PCI-e slot, incase there is a fault with the top slot.
I will update the post with more info once I have it.
I guess I'm asking if anyone has any ideas what could cause this intermittent boot failure?
Especially considering that the Windows installation, the hdd, the video card, the monitor and associated cables have all been changed.
Many thanks.
Ding
