PCA Forums

Gf and I were playing Halo, when Halo suddenly rebooted her PC like always. Then would not start up after the reboot. Cleared CMOS, tried starting up with onboard video and no cards in the slots, unplugged IDE cables and floppy drive. Tried to start it up absolutely bare stock...all it posts is the CPU specks then hangs.

Any ideas on what to do? Or does it sound like its pooched?

memory sticks ?

what motherboard ? I had a p4p8x do the same thing to me. I just set everything to default in the bios, and it rebooted fine.

1) make sure cpu / fan & HS / memory are seated properly

2) turn off PC , disconnect power cable, clear CMOS , on first boot set to optimized defaults( provided it boots of course )

should have mentioned memory sticks as well. There is a 128 and a 256 MB stick, tired them both individually and in different slots. Motherboard is an ECS K7SEM version 1.
Where it hangs there is not enough time to get into the BIOS, so the only thing I could do is clear the CMOS. And I tried that.
Seems like if I leave it long enough, it kind of wants to do something. Basically it looks like it is taking forever to address the IDE devices or the entire BIOS completely.

Ideas? Thanks!

Try holding the insert key when booting. Sometimes that will work.

Unplug and re-plug in the ide cables.

Try another video card.

If this happend when playing a game, sounds like a heat problem then. Reseat the video card., or/and try another one. If all the above fails, then I'd try another cpu. If you have extras around anyway. Was the video card oc'd?

Try holding the insert key when booting

did that and when I tried that the Duron 1 ghz posted as a Duron 990!!! Booooo but didn't boot any more then the CPU specs

I have plugged and unplugged multiple times now to no avail

tried between the onboard Vid and the Saphire 9000 64megger she always uses Vidcard was NOT OC'd in fact nothing is..

and it's Halo with an ATI card that's not BBAti... and there's ALWAYS a problem...Halo just restarts the comp.. I can't even play the demo on MY pc without it rebooting the whole system...

WTF.... Ok as I was typing all this it started to boot up.. after hanging at the very begining for about 7 min....
took a LOOOOOONG time then booted... ran scandisk and is now in windows.....
I'll keep you all updated...

*edit*
God damn it.... shouldn't have restarted.. back to it's same old tricks... it's not even posting the CPU specs yet... it's just hanging on the bios version...bloody hell...
when it did start up I got about 7 messeges popping up sayin Windows has recovered from a serious error....

wtf is goin on with this thing!?

Ok, it's still actin funny...
every time you shut the PC down and restart it, it take about 4 min for it to post the Loading windows screen and then another 2 min to get into windows

but after that it runs without a hitch....

why??? why why why....

Are you using the Cat 10's ? I had a similar problem. XP would tell me "There has been a device failure". I went back to the 3.8's and haven't had a problem since.

meh, it's Halo.. it restarts the system....it just does that

but why it would take forever to start up would have nothing to do with the drivers...
it's hangin LONG before any drivers load

it hangs and waits for 4 min before it detects the ide devices....

Did you you flash the bios of your video card ? I know Asus boards have problems with the 9500's after being flashed to allow for overclocking.

I had the same problem with HALO amopung other games where it would just reset, no BSOD, no error in event viewer, no mini dump

The problem ended up being the memory timings was too fast for one of my sticks, so i would reccomend looking at those
i had to set my command rate from 1 t to 2 t, dont know why the default in my bios was 1 t, stoopid thing