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Help! PC hanging on first boot

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JennyB:
It's pretty ancient - AMD Duron 1.3 Ghz, 256 Ram, XP Home -but it's all I have or can afford at present. Once up to speed, it's fine, but lately it's taken to hanging when I first switch on.  Not always at the same point, it could be anywhere in the boot sequence, which makes me think it could be hardware. The sysfan also seems to cut in and out, and run roughly.

It will (almost) always boot perfectly when I switch off and switch on again, and as I said, it's fine once it gets going, but it's not helping my nerves!

Any suggestions - (apart from leaving it switched on 24-7)?

mouser:
first thing first, regarding system fan; make sure the fans are actually all run and not turning off.  the quickest way to kill a computer is a broken fan.

f0dder:
Do you get any beep codes from the BIOS? (assuming you have your pc speaker (the cruddy little one inside the computer casing) connected). Does it hang, or does it "black out"? Does it happen in the BIOS startup sequence, or while windows is loading?

And yeah, be sure your fans are working... I don't think a duron would melt down within seconds as long as there's a heatsink on it, but even those old CPUs get rather hot, so eventually your cpu could end up fried if the fan isn't working.

JennyB:
Do you get any beep codes from the BIOS? (assuming you have your pc speaker (the cruddy little one inside the computer casing) connected). Does it hang, or does it "black out"? Does it happen in the BIOS startup sequence, or while windows is loading?

And yeah, be sure your fans are working... I don't think a duron would melt down within seconds as long as there's a heatsink on it, but even those old CPUs get rather hot, so eventually your cpu could end up fried if the fan isn't working.


-f0dder (April 21, 2007, 09:51 AM)
--- End quote ---

I've just let it cool off for half an hour, and it came back O.K. first time.

To answer your questions:

A single beep from the BIOS on power-up

It hangs. Processes stop, no response to mouse and keyboard, screen remains on.
Mostly at the "Loading Your Personal Settings"  stage, but it has stalled at various stages:

Turn on - some gibberish on the screen. After that time it told me the CMOS was corrupt, and it was loading the default values
BIOS loads OK, but disk light flashes once, but nothing seems to be read.
Windows loads OK, but hangs before all the systray items load.

A real puzzler  :tellme:

Re: Fans - the cpu fan is fine. The fan at the back of the PSU doesn't start spinning unitl about five seconds after power-up. "Cutting in and out" was a bit of an exaggeration, it's more like a speeding up and slowing down. It's quite noisy during the boot sequence, and still just noticeable thereafter.

f0dder:
Humm, I dunno how likely a PSU is to burst into flames :), but I'd be worried if the fan starts messing up. It's normal for recent PSUs to change their fan speed depending on how heavily they're loaded, but from your descriptions is sounds more like the fan (or perhaps the PSU itself?) is starting to malfunction. If the PSU is malfunctioning, it might be delivering unstable voltages to your motherboard, check the "hardware monitor" in your BIOS and see if it looks relatively stable (even my expensive antec PSU doesn't hit the right voltages 100%, and it also fluctuates a bit... I think it's around 0.1-0.2 volts off).

Single beep from BIOS stage is normal, to indicate that it actually works and your CPU isn't fried :)

Is the "gibberish on screen" just a lot of techno-jumbo text, or does it look like screen corruption? Any error/warning messages? CMOS corruption can happen if your CMOS battery needs replacement and you haven't had the wall socket the box is connected to powered on. It's not necessarily a problem (though if it keeps happening, you should get the battery changed), and it might be a good idea to review the BIOS settings and see if things are a-okay.

When the machine actually hangs, is that (almost) always when windows is about done loading? Might not be a heat problem since your CPU fan keeps working, but it might be a good idea checking the heatsink to see whether it's clogged up with dust. Could also be voltage problem as mentioned previously. Could be bad RAM, might be an idea to run memtest86 on it for a while, after checking other things. Might also want to check graphics card fan/heatsink.

There's so many things that can go wrong with computers, *sigh*.

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