Intermittent booting failure - why?

[SkylineUK]

I get intermittent boot failure with my desktop PC. It's a fairly powerful one I use in my home recording studio and is Intel i7 based.

 

About once in every six or seven boots (sometimes less frequent - no pattern) my PC goes through all its checks (visible on screen) and then hangs just before the Windows sign-in appears. A white cursor is left flashing in the top left hand corner of a black screen. Sometimes part-way through booting the PC will switch itself off and immediately back on again, often resulting in the hanging boot. I usually have to manually switch the PC power off and back on again, forcing reboots, sometimes five or so times, before booting into Windows happens. Then at other times the PC will boot with no problems whatsoever every day for days...

 

I thought the problem might be the SSD - my system disk - an OCZ-VERTEX3 - but last week I updated the firmware on it to the latest version and this hasn't cured the problem. Could it be the Motherboard than can cause such things? It's an ASUS P8Z68-V PRO and I have never updated anything on the motherboard since I bought the PC in 2011.

 

Any clues gratefully received! Many thanks.

[KenB]

Hi

 

Very often this sort of behaviour can be directed to the PSU.

Do you have another one that you can try?

 

It doesn't need to be the same wattage - even less will do to test.

 

The problem with intermittent problems like this is that they are very difficult to pin down.

It could be the m-board it could also be RAM or virtually any hardware.

Let's stick with PSU for the moment.