systems hangs before boot up after restart.

[gummy]

Hi to everyone..

I'm running a ep-8kha+ with athlon 1700.
first start seems to boot fine...but nearly everytime I restart , the system hangs for upto a minute or more. it just stops after shutting down , blank screen on monitor and the debug led display on mother board reads " FF "..

I have done the following tests so far..
: tried a new master Ultra ATA cable ( no difference )
: Tested harddrive in another stable system ( worked fine )
: Tested a different harddrive in the system ( same problem existed )
: Unplugged all CDroms, cards, etc ( no affect )
: Voltage on healthy pc was 12.48v on problem PC its varied between 11.61v to 11.79v..

at the moment I only have video card , floppy drive, and hard drive connected.. and keyboard , mouse , monitor of course.
so its looking like its a problem with mother board or cpu or power supply.

Any suggestions on which chips on mother board may be screwed or any form of test I could do, whether its a software test device or a hands on manual test of circuits.. would be greatly appreciated..

If you need any more info just let me know...

Thanks heaps for your support
Gummy...

 

[gummy]

First off, thanks for your reply MicroBell.

Now with installing new OS I have 3 harddrives that I have tried in the system. Each one has different OS, win2000pro, winXPpro and win98se...
The WinXP is a fresh install and a New WD harddrive. this belongs with the system.
I've attatched a picture (hopefully you can see clearly enough)
that points to 3 suspect capasitors on the board..
maybe this is the problem....

But I will see what I can do about trying a new PSU. would you recommend getting a 300W or higher PSU. The one thats in there at the moment is only 250W ( could this be a prob aswell )

Thanks again.

 

[gummy]

Thanks for all your info MicroBell, very much appreciated..

I should have mentioned that wasnt a picture of my board, it was just a pic from the epox web site.. just so I could show which capasitors were leaking..

having another look at the mother board, I have noticed about 5 capacitors that look like they are leaking.

But...
I seem to have fixed it by changing the JCK1 jumpers on the mother board from 133MHz down to 100MHz.. This seems to have fixed the start up problem..
but this is probably just a short term fix, considering the condition of the capasitors.. I did notice that the voltages go up and down a fair bit, which I guess comes back to the capsitors again..

Anyway, I think that now I have it working properly , I will just leave the capasitors till the board gives in, then upgrade to something a bit better..

Thanks for the help though..
Cheers for your time.
Gummy.