System Hangs During Boot

T

tdf2001

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Feb 17, 2006
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I am new here, so I hope it's the right place to post.

I have a system with the venerable ABIT-KT7 RAID board. Lately, my system hangs during boot at random times. This happens ONLY if it has been off for more than 3-4h. So we are trulyt talking about a cold boot. Once I wait for about five minutes for the machine to warm up, I have 100% stability. It's unlikely a driver problem as the same thing happens when I boot into Linux. This started to happen right around the time when my power supply fan gave out. I have it since replaced it to no avail.

The 'colder' the system, the sooner my machine will hang. When I say hang, I mean the system will simply stop, the mouse and all animation freezes. I don't get any BSODs, etc.

Specs:

1. ABIT KT7-RAID. This board has been replaced by ABIT about 30 days ago. On the old board the capcitators were buldging/leaking.
2. 300W SilentX Power Supply. This PSU does get hot as the fan does not move much air. It's about three years old.
3. Athlon XP Thunderbird at 2000Ghz. It runs rock solid in this board, even though it's not speced for it. I have had it for about 2 years. Runs Prime95 for hours.
4. Winfast Deluxe TV card.
5. Highpoint 1640 RAID controller
6. Two Hitachi/IBM disks, RAID0
7. Two standard DVD/CDROM drives
8. No name USB2 card
9. 3 sticks of 512MB SDRAM. THe ram ran for a few hours memtest. No problems.
10. Soundblaster Value

I am leaning two ways. It's either the PSU or the board. Both I have messed with relatively recently. I am 100% certain that the board did not behave this way for the first 1-2 weeks.
 
No one? I should add that very rarely the machine now freezes even after being on for 15-30 minutes. What typically causes a machine to simply freeze assuming it's not driver/software related as this happens in Windows and Linux just the same?
 
Suggestion
Try replacing the motherboard battery...it may be drained enough when cold booting that it cannot issue enough instructions to complete the boot at times..
 
The PSU wasn't it. I replaced it today with a new one and while things "appear" a little better, I am getting the the same system freezes, just not as often.

The battery is an idea but the board just came back from Abit and is likely refurbished. It looked pristine anyway with all new caps. I am thinking another RMA at this point...

Any other reason while a system would simply freeze. Software/drivers can be ruled out at this point. RAM seems to fine also.
 
The power supply wasn't it. I rma'ed the mainboard again and the new one works just fine (for now). I am going to give ABIT two thumps up for exchanging this board for a second time. I had it for more than 5 years now. And the way it performs it's going to last another 5+. All I need is a decent graphics board now. I have a 4200 Ti. Is there anything in the $150-200 range that will let me play recent games? The processor I use is a Thoroughbrad running at 2k. Thanks!
 
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