PC screwed after a crash

Sisko

***Solved at post 8 ***

**********************

Last night while doing some gaming the game (RUSE beta) froze when I hit the quit button.


So I had to restart the pc.

I haven't been able to get it to work since. 1st issue being my monitor not turning on when the pc boots. I figured out soon enough the PC never manages to get to windows anyway so something else was happening on boot up.

All I've done is mess around with the ram modules, taking them out switching them around , turning it on with 1 stick 2 stick etc (I've 4 x 1gb ddr2 corsair ram)

So eventually after constantly trying and restarting my monitor does come on. PC gets to the windows loading screen then freezes.

Specs:

Mobo - gigabyte P35C DS3R

CPU - Q6600

GPU - 9800GTX

Ram - 4gb corsair ddr2

I've 2 hard drives. One is 500gb and partitioned into 3 parts. One part has win xp 32 installed, another has win7 64 installed and the 3rd is storage.

My second HD is a 1 TB hd and is just for storage.


My PC freezes at the windows loading screen for both XP and Win 7. Sometimes my montior still won't turn on.


All I can do is keep messing with the ram sticks and restart hoping it'll get it windows.

I dunno wtf else to do.

PogMoThoin

If You can't boot to either os then some part of Your pc hardware is failing, 1st thing I'd suspect is the hard drive. Download Ubuntu on another pc and burn it to disk, set your pc bios to boot from cd 1st and then see if it starts to boot. Boot to ubuntu and try to mount the existing os hard drive, see if it mounts ok and that You can browse throught the folders. If this passes, reboot and run memtest for a few hours to test the memory.

Let us know how You get on

Sisko

cheers but I've been having back and forth issues with even being able to see what's happening on my pc. If I leave it for a while and then try it, the monitor will turn on, and either

A, I'll get to the very early stages of windows booting or me trying to load safe mode or start up repair and all those options...


And the PC freezes.

B, all that will show is that text you see when you 1st turn on your PC, it just stays on that and freezes.

However 90% of the time my monitor does not turn on at all. Whenever I get one of these freezes I restart to try something else and I'm back to the no monitor issue. & it stays like that no matter what I do, just tried every combination of ram and ram slots, nothing.... tried no ram at all.... nothing (I expected my pc to start doing a warning beep, my old one did that with no ram)

Its like it just doesn't detect the ram anymore.

sKeith

Do the capacitors around the CPU fan and the PSU 20/24 way plug look ok.
The strange symptoms you mention can come about if either, but not limited to, your PSU has gone faulty or the caps on your motherboard have gone bad. check out the pictures on this website
http://www.badcaps.net/pages.php?vid=5
To be able to identify if your caps are bad. Usually bulging or leaking at top or bottom or bent over by bulging bottoms.

kirving

I had a (kind of) similar problem recently, where the computer just wouldn't start windows.

Try taking out the motherboard battery and disconnect both hard drives and try to start it up again.
Turn it off, and replace the battery and reconnect the HD.

It must have reset something, and my pc started up!
I don't know what i did, but it's worth a shot!

Sisko

Hmmm yeah maybe somethings up with the mobo alright, a mate of mine suggested resetting the BIOS. I'll have a look in the morning.


What I tried yestarday was swap around GFX cards with my old one. Monitor came on but windows froze on load up yet again.

I did get into windows once, but apon restart same issues.

As I said , when I 'can' see whats happening it'll either freeze when windows trys to load, or it'll freeze right at the 1st screen.

When it does this it displays stuff differently to what I usually see. I took a pic:

sKeith

Because you reset your bios, some of the bios settings have changed. the screen you see is quite normal, but when your machine is fully working you can suppress that message from within the bios, 'quick boot' or 'hide POST' where post = Power On Self Test

Sisko

No you misunderstand, that post screen is different to my normal one, I hadn't touched my bios at that stage.

I just found it odd that when it crashed at the post screen, different info was displayed and thought it might give a clue but anyway:


It's working now

1stafter a little Google I came across this : Monitor Gets No Signal / Computer Won't Boot


and tried it, suggesting simply to plug out the power lead and hold in the power switch for a minute, plug it back in and turn it on.

When I did this, it 100% eliminated the monitor not turning on issue.

However , still no luck getting to windows.

This time what would happen is after the boot, I'd get a black screen for a min or two, then a windows recovery box would appear (asking me to pick keyboard layout and continue)

However at this point my PC would freeze at this screen.


So long story short, I tried clearing the CMOS.

and hey presto, everything's working!

****************************************

For anyone who comes across this post with the same issue as me, who does not know what I mean about clearing the CMOS.

Basically , on my motherboard there are these pins, which I located with the help of my manual.

With my PC off and plugged out, I placed one of those clips you use when setting a HD to master or slave on to the CMOS pins as per what the manual suggested.

( It also stated I could alternatively just touch the pins with a screw driver for a few seconds. )

After about a minute I took the clip off, plugged in my pc again and turned it on and everything worked perfectly.

Hope that helps anyone who might come across this issue.


jaysus and here was me thinking I'd need a new mobo/HD/gfx card/ram/psu

Sisko

Seems I DO need a new GFX card.... sigh

http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055885736