PC will not complete boot up.

[The Unknown Kadath]

I've been out of town for a couple of weeks. Friday I went to play a game or two and my PC would not boot. It would hang in various places (Boot up DOS screen, Windows screen, password screen) but would always freeze before completing boot up. After several attempts. The internal alarm started going off. So, I shut it down completely. I even turned off the back-up power supply everything is plugged in to.

Later that evening I opened it up and tried rebooting... Nothing. However, my motherboard's LED was showing that it was hanging while it was checking the memory. I noticed some dust around the DIMM (is there some sort of dust filter I can use?) so I shut it off and cleaned everything off and tried rebooting. Still nothing. It continued to hang at the memory check. I shut it down...

Suunday afternoon, on a whim, I tried turning it on again. It booted! Yay! So, I logged on the Everquest for a bit. Thought I could run it through its paces. Everything worked fine. For about 2 hours. Then it completely froze. In game I was just seeing a frozen image. I couldn't exit so I hard booted it.

Now, it will not get past the DOS page during boot up that listed all of the system resources.

Any ideas? I am completely broke right now and am hoping to God I can identify and eliminate this problem myself. Your assistance is GREATLY appreciated.

BTW, I have:

Athlon 1.13Ghz
256 Megs of DDR
MSI 4360 Motherboard

[mjc]

Try pulling out the RAM sticks and reseating them....if that does not help then try a new stick of RAM (a known good stick). Try it in each slot, then try one of the current sticks in each slot and so on....

------------------
mjc
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.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Confucious say (or should anyway),

"When you finary http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif get sinking boat to dock, it is imperative that one begins to remove all passengers at once."

With problems such as you describe you should be concentrating on virii and other problems like bad memory and such. Was it booted and online while you were away? DSL?

Reseat your memory cards and see if you can get into BIOS. Even try one at a time if so equipped. Hopefully you don't have to use your HDD as fertilizer. You had a golden opportunity to do some diagnostics, hopefully you will again. But more system specs will be needed to further diagnose or suggest fixes. What brand HDD? Does BIOS see it? Do the fans run? Is power supply voltages right? There may be a diag. test for the HDD available on-line.

Alright, I got to first base, would the next batter get a hit so the team might score a run (fix)? http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/rolleyes.gif
________________________________________________

Put me in coach, I'm ready to play, today.
Put me in coach, I'm ready to play, today.
Look at me, I could be, Centerfield.
John Fogerty

[ski]

If the backup power supply you're referring to is an UPS system, then did you try bypassing it.

[The Unknown Kadath]

Thanks for the suggestions.

It turns out my motherboard had 'blown a fuse'. 5 of them in fact. I replaced the board and all is well again.

I just wish I kneww why that happened so I can avoid it in the future.