weird sequence happening when booting up

Farrsolo

New Member
Amidst pricing out a server for myself, my co-worker gave me his old desktop that he had sitting in his basement. He stopped using it because he said it was not working.

Once the power button is pressed, the pc would start up, then shutdown, start up then shutdown, over and over until you closed off the power to the PSU.

So I took out old hard drive, put in an old 300gb WD, booted up the bios fine, installed windows and everything was working great. Great as an ASUS P5E3 and Core 2 Quad Q9650 LGA 775, could run. Installed windows, did all updates, installed some monitoring software (CPUID). Everything seemed fine. Temps were good. Fans working.

However I tried to start up the machine again after work today to play around with it some more and it is running the same sequence that my co-worker had. Shutdown, startup, shutdown and startup. Can't do anything to it. Any ideas what could be causing the problem?


Thanks!
 

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PohTayToez

Active Member
At what point is it shutting down? Does it load into Windows? Restart right after showing the Windows loading screen?

Does the motherboard have an onboard graphics card? If so I'd remove the other graphics card and try just using the motherboard video and see if it resets.
 

Farrsolo

New Member
At what point is it shutting down? Does it load into Windows? Restart right after showing the Windows loading screen?

Does the motherboard have an onboard graphics card? If so I'd remove the other graphics card and try just using the motherboard video and see if it resets.

No Onboard graphics,

HDD is sata, I don't own a IDE drive,

the power up and down cycle is about 3-5 seconds, windows doesn't load, i doubt the bios loads, as soon as i press power on, it starts booting, but then shuts down 3 seconds later, just as power lights go out, it starts back up

graphics card is a GTX 260,

buddy told me he bought this hunk of junk for like $5000 from a place in USA "IBUYPOWER" had it shipped to canada, used it for 6 months then it died, been sitting in his basement for like4 years...could be anything, he assumed powersupply but didnt try anything...
 
Try this..remove all but one stick of memory. Start up and see if it will boot with that stick. If not change that one out with another stick. Keep doing this to rule out a dead stick of RAM.

If it boots up with one stick, keep adding sticks of memory until it doesn't boot anymore. report back if this doesn't work.
 

Farrsolo

New Member
Try this..remove all but one stick of memory. Start up and see if it will boot with that stick. If not change that one out with another stick. Keep doing this to rule out a dead stick of RAM.

If it boots up with one stick, keep adding sticks of memory until it doesn't boot anymore. report back if this doesn't work.

Haha, I just checked the case and there is one stick of RAM that looks like a 2GB.

I don't have any extra RAM,

I know, haha no d*mn help at all.

What happens if I take out that stick of RAM and boot?
 

Farrsolo

New Member
tomorrow if I have time I will take apart everything, clean, try re-seating everything, I would expect this to be an issue since my co-worker has ran this PC in years.

But it was very strange, that I had it running with full functionality, updates all done, connected it to my network, remote desktop in, was setting it up to be my media server. Today I was going to install my data drives and connect to my home network.

I just created this thread to see if anyone has ever seen this behavior. I have seen bad boot ups with the beep error codes, but nothing like this. start up, shut down, start up, shut down, over and over.

haha, so weird!

thanks anyways, will post back once i do a thorough tear down and clean, possibly some loose connections?
 
Bad memory can play tricks at times. maybe you could find a friend that has the same type of memory and would let you borrow it for testing.
 

Farrsolo

New Member
nope, didn't really want to take the one out of my working PC.
Don't have a spare either.

How can you test a PSU? there must be some diagnostic procedure for it?
 

Farrsolo

New Member
So I finally had some time to open up this desktop and take a look, I took out the GTX260, the one ( and only) stick of 2GB DDR3 1600 RAM, left the CPU and Heatsink on, and checked over every connection.

I left the HDD that I installed windows on and booted up. Booted up fine, got to this screen, http://aphnetworks.com/reviews/asus_p5e3_deluxe/11

never seen a boot up menu like this before on any other PC, i selected Enter OS, windows seemed to load, but there was an error with the disk, so I let CHKDSK run and now it has been a half hour of this sequence:

"Deleting index entry _ _ _ _ _ _~.JPG in index $130 of file 72"

this has been scrolling down my screen nonstop all the way from the 72 up to 153 now.

Anybody have any idea what is going on? How long this is going to take? What are these JPG's it is deleting?

There is nothing on the HDD that I require, it is nothing but a fresh install of windows 7.

Is this sequence doing anything?? or should I format the drive and re-install windows?

Thanks!
 
It may be time to put a new HDD into the machine. The last time I had problems with the "deleting index entry" problems in chkdsk it was the hard drive. And since you say this is a fresh install on the HDD sounds like it is definitely time to replace it. You might be able to do a fresh install again, but it probably won't be long till you start having the chkdsk problems again.
 

Farrsolo

New Member
The HDD was just an old 300gb WD SATA drive I had laying around, probably pushing 6 years old, mildly used though, But I will definietly try another HDD,

However that being said, I let the sequence run,and the CHKDSK finally finished about 2 hours later. Restarted and it booted up fine. Let the PC run all night and just checked it this morning and it is still functional. I turned it off and I will check it again once I get home.

I am going to stop in at a small computer store on the way home and see if they have any used RAM they can sell me cheap. the PC used to have xp on it and currently only has 2GB of DDR3 1600 ram, I put Windows 7 Ultimate, so I should probably stick in another couple GB's at least.

Thanks!
 

Farrsolo

New Member
So I got another stick of 2GB ram to give me 4 GB total, and computer booted up fine again today. Is it possible that the ram or video card or some loose connections could have been the cause of issues I was having at the start of this thread??

I have been running CPUID monitor and temps and speeds seem ok, is there anything other tests I can run to see if everything is actually ok?

Thanks!
 

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
Sorry for not replying sooner. Between errors on the drive and low on memory, I'm sure the system runs a lot better. Be warned though, you may continue to have issues with the drive depending on what the original issue was.
 

Farrsolo

New Member
i am going to format a new 1TB drive, put windows 7 on that one and see how the computer runs, going to set up PLEX on it with some data, and see how it streams. IF it seems to work fine, then I will use it for now, until I upgrade the hardware down the road. That old MB and CPU(ASUS P5E3 and Core 2 Quad Q9650 LGA 775) should handle streaming to devices like ROKU and iPad with no issues. I think!!

Thanks
 
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