PC Rebooting Problem

D

deadman_uk

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 30, 2003
Messages
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I'm spending a week at my dads and noticed that everytime I reboot his PC, the following happens:

- Fans go on 100% power indefiniately
- Monitor goes on standby indefiniately
- Hard drive like flashes on and off (like normal)

My dads PC is cutom built by me last year, his OS is Windows 8 x64 and is installed on an SSD. What is causing this? any ideas?
 
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Probably a weird issue with the sleep states in the motherboard's BIOs?
 
I've run into a similar issue on a system I gave to my parents a few years back. The machine will shut down just fine, boot fine, operate fine in every other way, but will hang on a restart if done from the OS. The heart of that system is a cpu and motherboard (Phenom 9600 and Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe) that I used for a few years and with which I never experienced this issue. These days, the hang on reboot is guaranteed. Where my issue is different is that the monitor doesn't go into standby but, instead, I see the very first lines of the BIOS system check. It seems to hang right before it does the memory check portion of the BIOS boot sequence. It's not an issue if the machine is doing a cold boot.

So what changed? I moved the motherboard, cpu, ram, gpu, etc. to a new case with a new power supply. I strongly suspect that there is some minor incompatibility between the motherboard BIOS and the PSU. Maybe the PSU doesn't cycle down quite far enough or something (I'm reaching here, but trying to rationalize) on the software reboot? For the record, new case is an Antec Three Hundred ATX model and the PSU is an Antec Earthwatts 500W. The OS that I had before was Vista and then Win7. It is currently running Win7.

I didn't have the cash or inclination to try a different PSU to see if it would solve the problem. It is what I suspect. As it is, my parents tend to just boot the computer up and shut it down normally and almost never need to do a software reboot. If they do... time to hit the reset button.
 
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Thanks DesertCat,

I just updated the BIOS from version F3 to F9. I also disabled quick reboot under Windows 8. Let's see if those help. Also, I restart from a custom made shortcut reboot button that I pinned to the start menu. Do you think that could cause this?
 
I hope you find a fix, but this is the kind of stuff that enters into borderline voodoo to solve. I would be highly surprised if it has anything to do with Win8 and any part of the software reboot sequence (I reserve the right to be wrong though). As I suspect in my case, I think it is probably something that goes back to the motherboard/BIOS/PSU handshaking that occurs during the reboot. It's pretty typical for machines to spin up the fans, etc. during the boot process and then slow them down once the BIOS starts doing its system check. If it is hanging at that point, that would suggest to me that the OS doesn't have anything to do with it (it hasn't loaded yet).

There are all kinds of weird things that can happen during shutdown and reboot, particularly with the sleep states and such that motherboards now have. The most mystical one that I actually solved (with the help of another guy that had the same issue), was during shutdown of WinXP about 12 years ago. We figured out that that it was some sort of weird incompatibility between a particular Asus-AMD motherboard and a Netgear NIC (FA311). That particular witches brew caused the system to hang during shutdown and never turn off. When I put in a different brand of NIC, the issue went away. I later installed the Netgear NIC in an Intel based system and it worked just fine. Funny thing is I probably helped a dozen other people solve the same issue. Most thought I was full of crap when I suggested installing a different NIC (no way that could be the issue dude!) but once they got over the need to spend ~$35 and tried it, it worked every time. Never did see a BIOS release that addressed that issue.
 
Just to update this thread, when I unplug the HDMI cable that runs from the TV to the PC, the problem is fixed. This is the cause but why? Anything I can do other than leaving the cable unplugged? I like to clone the desktop onto the TV.
 
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