Problems booting up... help diagnose?

[koda_]

Okay, I'm having a problem with my computer. I built it about ten months back, and it's been acting up recently.

90% of the time it won't boot up. When I can get it up and running it runs perfectly fine as long as I don't try to reset or shut down. Once I try to reboot, when the problem occurs, the PC itself does turn on-- the fans spin up, all the LEDs in the case turn on, so it looks like everything is getting power... but nothing comes on the screen. No signal whatsoever to the monitor. The odd thing is that even though the fans and such power on, most of the time the USB devices (external HDD and mouse) don't have power running to them. When it does work fine, those devices seem to get power immediately.

Even when the thing boots, it's choppy during the POST sequence... During the memory test it will hang, so that it looks like "Memory tes" on the screen for several seconds... and then the rest will appear-- "Memory testing blah blah blah".

I don't really have spare parts to swap in and out, so this is difficult for me to troubleshoot. Do you guys have any ideas? I hate having no idea whether or not I'll be able to get my computer back on each time I need to reboot it.

The symptoms are kinda all over the place, so I'm not sure which component is to blame. I thought it might be the PSU, but I'm using a 550w Gigabyte Odin GT, and I know that those things are extremely efficient... so it seems like it should be enough power. The fact that the USB devices don't always receive power though is concerning... then again, the fact that it hangs on the memory test makes me think it might be the RAM... and the lack of signal makes me think it might be the GPU... and any one of these things could mean it's the mobo or something.

So yeah... I'm kinda upset about it. I'm going to remedy the problem, but before I start buying replacement parts I need to know what needs replacing. =/

Any ideas? Thanks in advance....

 

[tiraides]

Try some of the troubleshooting steps listed in the GenHard FAQ/sticky. They should help narrow down what's wrong.

Also, to help us out, please list out the specs of your build.

Some other suggestions:

- Just to rule the RAM out:
Download Memtest+ V.170, unzip it, burn the ISO file to a CD, and then boot from it, just like you would do with the XP install CD. Let Memtest+ run for at least three hours on each stick of RAM separately. Go for a full 24 hours if you want to be completely sure that the RAM is not a problem. If you start seeing errors, than your RAM is bad.

- Clear CMOS

- Download and burn to a CD Drive Fitness Test. Boot and run it to see if the hard drive is defective.

 

[koda_]

Thanks for the response... if at all possible right now, I'd like to try to avoid anything that requires me to reboot/shutdown my PC, just because I don't know if I'll be able to get it back on to access the boards again.

Obviously I'll need to turn it off to fix the problem, but I'd like to get as close to identifying the problem as possible beforehand... =/

Specs are....

Windows Vista 64
Gigabyte P35C-DS3R Intel P35
Intel Core2Quad Q6600 Kentsfield - 2.4GHz
4x1GB OCZ Reaper HPC DDR2-800
Gigabyte Odin GT 550w
Gigabyte GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB PCI-Ex16
Western Digital Raptor X 150GB 10kRPM

I think that's all of the important stuff.

 

[tiraides]

I can't help you in that regards. The tools that were referenced earlier were meant to help diagnose and narrow down the specific problems.