Infinite Vista Boot Time

[Gibby1313]

Hey guys. this is my first time so please be gentle :P

 

I'm having a major issue with a friends machine following a PSU transplant.

 

He was running a new graphics card for 5 months (rated for 350w min) on a 250w psu. as of late the power drain became too much for the system and it started shutting down the graphics card/ sound card systematicly. Today i talked him into replacing his PSU with one rated for his current load. After replacing the 250 with a 400 his PCIEx16 slot stopped responding. Being no stranger to the inner workings of a PC i fiddled with the connections until i finally got power moving to the graphics card, but there was still no signal. I could connect to the onboard graphics and get a signal however. after many failed attempts i decided to clear the cmos and start from there.

 

Now I'm facing an issue i've never had before.... After clearing the CMOS i cant get Vista to boot up, it gets to the "thinking" screen and stays there, not locks up, jsut stays there infinitely with no HDD activity. The machine is a bone stock Compaq build so the bios are extremely cut down but i noticed that the System Cache value in the bios is "none" which is confusing the heck out of me.:confused:

 

I'm usually quite resourceful but this one has me at a loss. Any input on this would be greatly appreciated!

[Seamus]

An option would be to "jump" your BIOS, using the jumpers on the MotherBoard, so that your CMOS is reset to it's default settings. Maybe that would work? I haven't tried this before I've just heard people talk about it; so you might want to get more information on it before you try it. :)

[Plastic Nev]

Hi, I think from what you say Gibby you have already cleared the BIOS back to default, but the simplest way is pull the battery out for a few minutes, safer than messing with those pins.

Lets go back to basics first, the new PSU, did it have exactly the same number of plugs and are wire colours and pin positions the same on all plugs?

I think you mean this rig is a manufactured one rather than a home build, and like Dell, some manufacturers use their own proprietary PSU's with odd non standard connections, I would check that out first.

if you have a voltmeter or multimeter check the voltages correspond on all pins, between the two PSU's.

Nev.

[Gibby1313]

TY for your input so far. As of today i have the machine able to post and boot on both the new and old power supplies with no difference in performance.

 

It takes about 45 minutes for Vista to load fully and it seems to be processing about as fast as water eroding a canyon =P

 

I have it narrowed down to a CPU or MB error at this point but neither of these conclusions make a whole lot of sense....

 

I'm currently loading a copy of Speccy on it right now (which should take about 3 days at its current computing power) hopefully it should score me a bit more info to share.

[Plastic Nev]

Hi, it just might be a RAM error, how much RAM does it have? and if more than one stick in, try removing one and try again, if no different, put it back and remove the other.

If only one stick then I would try a memory test.

Have a look here-

http://extremetechsupport.com/forum/memory-issues/7172-memtest86-run.html

 

If there is something wrong with the RAM it could account for the very slow processing speeds.

Nev.

[Gibby1313]

OK, I successfully narrowed it down to the MB cache and have a new MB on the way, TY all for your time and input, it was greatly appreciated!

[Gibby1313]

RAM was the first thing i checked. next i checked the PSU for low output. After that i loaded and ran Speccy to find that EVERYTHING checked out except core temps for the CPU...

 

According to Windows Vista the CPU was running at 100% capacity but Speccy showed that it was only operating at 43c which is pretty much idle temp for a 4550e AMD cpu which narrows the problem to the CPU/MB interface or cache. But as the temps didnt spike or fluctuate i was able to determine the problem to be on the board rather than the CPU, as internal issues in the CPU would most definitely cause the CPU to run hot or at the very least force abnormal thermal activities (which was not the case).