My computer needs to warm up before it boots?

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puppyfriend

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 14, 2005
Messages
119
I started having a problem last week. My computer needs to warm up before it can boot. Once it boots, I can reboot again until it cools down again. Then I need to reboot again.

Symptoms are that, when it's cold, the only thing that lights up is the harddisk light. The 5V rail is at 5V. If I just leave it like that, I see the 5V rail drop to 4.75V or so. Then a couple of minutes later I hear the harddisk spin up and then if I power cycle or hit reset again the machines boots fine. This process takes about 10 minutes. I've tried removing everything, drives etc, so that it's just the PSU and the MB and graphics card and it still exhibits this same behavior before it will POST.

Once it's up it's as solid as ever.

What is going on?
 
sounds very much like a flaky power supply. they do very strange things when they are about to go out. i would suggest that you try a known good psu in it before you do anything else.
 
i second that...switch out your psu before it fries and takes your whole system with it ;)
 
cell_491 said:
i second that...switch out your psu before it fries and takes your whole system with it ;)
Click to expand...

motion passed...get a new psu stat before you lose some hardware
 
As a note; have you tried booting your system with another PSU? Do you have a secondary test box that you can test your current PSU in? What brand is your current PSU? Prior to just going out and spending the $50-100 that it's going to cost you, try and make sure that your problem actually is the PSU.

Also, when purchasing a PSU, got with a decent brand, such as Antec, Enermax, Sparkle, Fortron, or another that is recommended by the guys in the PSU forum.
 
check the voltages with a multimeter... I once had a Fortron PSU that after switching on would give me like 9V on the 12V line... after some time the Voltage would rise over 11V and the comp would start...
 
Oh, and regarding your voltages, try moving around what's on what molex connector; there have been instances where if you alleviate some of the load on some connectors and increase it on others you have a decrease in the wobbling on your voltages. That said, 4.75 is REALLY low.
 
Thanks guys. Will try a different PSU by swapping out the one from my HTPC. By the way it's a Enermax. Maybe I'll try to 5V mod for Enermaxes to try to bring it up.
 
puppyfriend said:
Thanks guys. Will try a different PSU by swapping out the one from my HTPC. By the way it's a Enermax. Maybe I'll try to 5V mod for Enermaxes to try to bring it up.
Click to expand...

How old the PSU? If it's still under warranty, I'd seriously consider shipping it back to enermax.
 
It was the PSU like you guys said. Stupid Enermax power supplies. What a waste of money. Back to the super cheap generics for me. I've never had one of those fail on me. In fact that's what I'm running now in emergency mode. The only spare I have is 220watts. So I had to disconnect one HD, the DVD and the floppy so that the 5V rail wouldn't drop below 4.9V.
 
Enermax generally makes decent PSUs, sorry to hear that you got a bad one. You might want to take a look at the PSU forum and see what they'd recommend to you. The last thing you want is for a mediocre PSU to blow on you, and take components with it.
 
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