Intermittent No POST problem

arsenalbates

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I have a tower that sometimes will not post (get no graphics on screen and no HDD activity)

Most of the time its fine but it can have a funny spell and not work for about an hour before deciding to POST.

i have reseated all components and changed the CMOS battery. I have also reset the BIOS.

Any ideas on this ?
 
Just a sanity check, why you say you reseated all components, did you do both sends of the sata cables to any drives? Some times people neglect those so let's just throw that out as a possible factor.

The times it does't POST, is there any pattern to it? Like is it always after a restart, only cold boots, after a BSOD etc.?

Then just as a catch-all, have you done memtest and a hard drive scan?
 
Just now i shut it down normally and then pressed the reset button (after it had powered down) and then pressed the power button and it didnt post. Then removed the reset button cable from the board and powered on and still the same prob.

Took out a PCI USB card and it booted fine on the third attempt.

Reinserted card and its still booting fine.

i cant seem to find a pattern to the problem atm. Nothing in particular seems to be triggering it.

I have done mem test which come back clear but not HDD test. Didn't think it was relevant as its before it reads the HDD.

CPU is about 71 degrees on idle which i know is very high. (normal heatsink but second hand third party cooler that dont even fit properly.

Think it could be processor ?

---------- Post added at 03:47 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:43 PM ----------

i sometimes get the message "some changes in the chipset or clock settings caused boot failure. Defaults for these settings have been loaded.
 
PSU maybe. Try pulling the 24 pin power plug off the board and jump out the green to a black. Does the PSU come on? Does it come on every time you jump that connection?
 
OK fitted a new cooling fan on the heatsink and now the temps are more sensible at about 50 degrees.

and yes i have tried that and it always comes on. Even when i dont get a picture the fans and psu all turn on.
 
ok, this is what im going to do.

Send it back to client but change one hardware component (like the graphics card). Then if it continues to happen, put that old part back in and swap another component over (like the PSU).

Keep doing this in the hope that it will stop doing it and therefore the component that i have removed is the troublesome part.
 
... but not HDD test. Didn't think it was relevant as its before it reads the HDD.

To a Degree you're right but POST still tries to detect the drive and if the drive is having issues reporting itself it can cause POST to hang. It's rare and I've only seen it twice but a possibility. What I don't know about this, is assuming a bad drive, if that could cause the chipset/clock settings error you're getting.
 
i have pulled the usb pci extention card out and the graphics card.

Going to send back to client and see if the issue persists and go from there.

Doing a full HDD test now using seatools dos.
 
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