Supposed to be wrapping up a major (£500m+) piece of work this weekend and my uber-box has died on me. Fortunately I have upto the minute sync backups of all my work files and the little Netbook plugged into a peripheral mouse/keyboard/VDU to work on but dammit it's inconvenient.
Computer running fine first thing this morning fine, went to make breakfast, came back to VDUs showing standby light. NO response from moving mouse/mashing keys to wake it up. No power light on front of case but fans running! 4sec hard reboot, fans power up, network card lights flash, mobo green LED on, but nothing on the screens, no BIOS or Post beeps etc. Just fans whirring. SSC OS drive so cant be sure it's not actually running boot...but dont think it is. Have one VDU on VGA and other on HDMI both from video card.
Computer genius brother on way over, but any help from you guys on diags would be great...
*flashes Cougar lamp into sky*
...errr, just had a thought if video card dead, both VDUs off video card, SSD drive silent booter...hmm
*runs off to try VGA off mobo*
Nope. That doesnt help. No power light illuminating on front of case even though fans spinning...
Overheated? Maybe a fan not seated properly somewhere?
I have had a similar issue with mine in the past and it has boiled down to the rubbish fan I installed coming slightly loose from the heatsink (its one of those stupid Coolermaster ones where the fan clips to a massive heatsink with two bent paperclips) or on occasion coming slightly away from the cpu.
unplug the comp take the cmos battery out of the mobo for 30 seconds and replace and replug and return on.
if no joy unplug everything thats not needed apart (extra pci cards for network ect..) just leave the main harddrive into the mobo and gcard keyboard and mouse and try
if your displays being funny get your geeky mate to bring over a gcard to test in yours
have disconnected video card and now get a power light on the front, but no boot or post messages etc. PC powers down automatically after 30s.
WTF is it doing?
Open it up check everything is nice and dust free and sitting where it's supposed to be.
If you can try different cable from GFX card to VDU and test them with you netbook if you can although sounds like you already did this.
unplug the comp take the cmos battery out of the mobo for 30 seconds and replace and replug and return on.
This should be at the bottom of the list.
cheers - off to attack the CMOS battery
Drac please excuse my anger but your wrong- I was exporting a 50 day render and got to my computer and experienced exactly the same as above... turns out it was a freak glitch... what harm is a 30 second test anyway you negitive bastardo.
also stoner take all your ram out apart from 1 stick basically eliminate as many variables as you can
Before you rule out "no POST beeps" make sure there's a speaker connected... (-:
PITA this one, cos it could be any number of things. Most likely is motherboard or PSU failure, in the absence of tools the easiest way of testing is by cabling up a donor supply.
Random things to do whilst you're waiting for the big guns to arrive: Try booting with everything non-essential disconnected (eg, HDD) so you're putting minimal load on the PSU; if there's integrated video on the mobo then pull the video card and roll back to that; reseat RAM; reseat CPU.
Drac please excuse my anger but your wrong
No he isn't.
It's not something you should never do, but it's not a first step. Pulling the battery will lose CMOS contents (ie, all your BIOS settings), so you should consider the implications of this.
Its near the top of the list with his symptoms, not what I recommend for everyman and his dog.
whats the system and whats the psu is it a cheapy?
No, it's not.
You said yourself, it corrected a freak situation, not a common one. I'm glad it worked for you, but you got lucky.
This could be a freak situation you dont know enough info yet
Damn this is frustrating.
Had everything off - only SSD connected and one back of RAM. Have tried both banks individually.
Got power light on front, but now the PC is not powering down on it's own. Just happily whirring away with no VDU output - so no idea if it's booting or not.
Really doubt it's PSU - New Corsair HX1000
should it be able to boot with no RAM?
Re POST beep - d'Oh forgot I had disconnected amp 🙂 But plugged back in and still no beeps.
This could be a freak situation you dont know enough info yet
Well, yes, but don't you think perhaps it's a better idea to explore likely scenarios [i]before [/i]taking potentially destructive steps to try and fix fringe cases?
Whatever, anyway. I'm not going to argue about it.
only SSD connected
You can pull that, too.
forgot I had disconnected amp
You won't get POST beeps through the soundcard, it needs to be an internal speaker.
New Corsair HX1000
Modular PSU? Firmly connected cables at the PSU end?
should it be able to boot with no RAM?
No - missing video or missing RAM will cause it to fail POST with beeps (once those two are present it can route errors to the screen instead, y'see).
well first thing I'd try would be a mates gcard and see what that shows.
If you dont get to see a bios screen its most likely mobo / vcard related
whats the chip, whats the heatsink and when was it last pasted and cleaned?
right, making progress.
Have tested SSD on netbook - readable. Cant test boot natch.
Dug out bootable XP USB I built a while ago - stick lights up. No VDU output.
Guessing its the VDU output on the board now, so have re attached GCard and connected VGA. BIOS posts WOOHOO!
Now to re attach SSD...
currently booting W7 from SSD. phew
now need to stick it all together again.
Unfortunately havent found the problem. I wouldnt be surprised if it's the mobo shorting on the case - I reckon I had a similar problem when I first got this unit.
Anyone recommend a daddy case - doesnt need to be small - lives ina cupboard. Want good quality.
Cheers for the help everyone.
Thermaltake Level 10:
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🙂
Unfortunately havent found the problem.
From what you've described I'd suggest something was loose that you've now reseated, video card perhaps.
(and, yay!)
Coolermaster Cosmos?
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Well bruv came round, we've taken everything apart. I even took the mobo out of the case and stuck it back in again. We cant recreate the video fault off the video card, but have found that we can never get video output from the mobo. Bruv cant find any settings in the bios (or manual - I cant believe I actually kept the mobo manual!) to disable/enable it. (ASUS P7H55-M SI) if anyone has any ideas let me know.
All working again now anyway. I think it flaked out when I opened the cupboard mid-morning to retrieve something and the vibrations of the cupboard door must have caused the mis-connection/short.
New case maybe I think for peace of mind. If it doesnt solve it then it's tough to call whether its then the mobo or the video card that's flaky 🙁
well whaddya know:
[i]The Asus P7H55m Pro's 'onboard video' is actually just support for the GPU that comes built in to Intel Core i3's and some Core i5's (these are the 'Clarkdale' line of processors). Higher end i5's and Core i7's are Lynnfield processors, and have no built in graphics processor. So the motherboards graphics will only work with Clarkdale processors.
So, for the original poster, there's nothing wrong with the motherboard - your processor just isn't a version that has a built in graphics processor. Also, with a Lynnfield processor on this motherboard, if you are only using 2 DIMMS of RAM (rather than 4) they MUST be in the blue slots. With Clarkdale processors they can be in the blue or the black. My motherboard came with a slip of paper making note of that fact.
[/i]
Mine's a Lynnfield i5.
Hah, no way. Not come across that, good to know. Cheers for the info.
now if I could just isolate the annoying sound interference!
Amp connected to green phono at rear of case - port on mobo.
All fine for 5 minutes then a faint low freq buzzing comes over the speakers. Tap mute (whether muting on or off, doesnt matter) and buzz disappears for five minutes.
Damn annoying.
so what cheap sound card to bypass onboard shenanigans...?
Can you stick the video card in a different slot?
no - only 1 slot for it.
Bum.
ive tried using rear phono, front, twiddling stuff on the Vinyl HD Audio control deck, but I either get that buzzing or I get a constant scratchy whiny noisy. No idea what's causing it.
Got a spare PCI slot so shall bung a cheap card in I reckon.
what harm is a 30 second test anyway you negitive bastardo.
Such anger is this one.
Well let's see:
He looses his settings for his Mobo, CPU and Ram
He may mask the problem by resetting his Bios
It may start defaulting to another device for boot up
I could go on but Cougar has covered most of it and in fact so did you [i]"This could be a freak situation you dont know enough info yet "[/i] which is a valid reason not to do it.
Glad you sorted and guess what it was something loose, what a guess ay? 😀
Glad you sorted and guess what it was something loose, what a guess ay?
put yer cock away! it might not have been loose, it might have been a short. Smart arse 😉
You saying my cock is short? 😐
well I cant see from here, so.....