Erratic Boot behaviour

[rainyday]

My one year old PC has an erratic boot behaviour.

Many times when powered on, the fans come on, the LED's glow and
there's a small grinding noise and nothing else happens.
The moniter remains blank (with its power indicator LED on and blinking).
No beep sound is heard.

Strangely, this doesnt happen always. It boots sometimes and works well too.
If the system is running and then shut down/turned off,when it is turned back on it will boot and run OK.
If the system is then left over night I have no video and no POST .


The configuration is
Processor : Celeron 600Mhz,
Mother board: Intel 810e chipset
RAM : 64MB SDRAM. (dont know the speed).
HDD : 10GB Seagate
BIOS : Award Modular BIOS v6.00 PG


Cld this be a problem with the video card / RAM. Any suggestions,cheers for any help.

[mjc]

What brand is it?

And has the warranty run out yet? If not get on with the manufacturer's tech support before it does......

I'm going to guess hard drive or power supply.

------------------
mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.


[This message has been edited by mjc (edited 12-19-2001).]

[rainyday]

Originally posted by mjc:
What brand is it?

And has the warranty run out yet? If not get on with the manufacturer's tech support before it does......

I'm going to guess hard drive or power supply.




It is an assembled PC. And the vendors warranty expired just last month :-(. But if its the HDD then how wld it function on the nicer instances? And the power supply is thru a UPS which wld anyway filter out any fluctuations / spike in the voltage. Are you refering to the SMPS for any reason?

[ski]

The grinding noise is not good.
Sounds like a failing hard drive.
Does this noise occur during every startup?
If not, then does the system fail to boot only when the grinding noise is heard? If so, then it's a bad HD.

[rainyday]

Ski,
The grinding noise occurs on every start up. Whenever the HDD is accessed for any reason (from windows say) this noise is heard. But then its quite low.

The video card is inbuilt in the motherboard. So - I'm not able to suspect it. Cld this be coz of any lose power connection from the SMPS to the Mother board?

[mjc]

The UPS would filter spikes and such but if the actual power supply in the computer is going bad then nothing on the outside will help...

Also, have you recently installed any new hardware?

Run scandisk and test the surface...it will take a ong time, but it will help to find out if the drive is failing.

------------------
mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.

[rainyday]

Mjc,
Wld this be a power problem from the output of the SMPS?? anyway lose connections u mean??

I have run scan disk and there are no disk errors. I have not installed any new any hardware. But I installed Red hat linux 6.1 recently to sit along with Windows ME. The boot controller is LiLo.