Won't restart.

[nerdlogic]

My rig will not restart. I can shutdown, then start up just fine, but I can't restart. It will shutdown aand the system will basically reset, but it won't start back up. I have to kill the AC(no reset button), then turn it back on. This started happening after setting my FSB above 175, so what's going on? Specs in my sig.

[irish80122]

Hmmmm, and nothing else has changed? I know that some MS operating systems have this problem, but it is strange to have it brought on by a FSB increase. Have you checked iwth Windows Update lately to see if you are up to date, just to be safe? That would be my first bet.

[InThrees]

Actually, it's most likely a flaky m/b problem. I used to have an old 486DX2/50 on some random m/b that would exhibit the same symptoms.

You could turn it on from off and it would post fine.
However, you could not do an automatic windows restart, OR a ctrl-alt-del restart from dos, it simply would not post.

[InThrees]

To test if it's hardware, btw, make a win98 boot floppy that doesn't reference the IDE-0 OS at all - just boots to floppy and that's it.

Ctrl-alt-del from the a:> and if it posts, it's prolly not hardware. If it doesn't post, then it prolly IS hardware.

[Daemonfly]

Only after going to 175 FSB?

Could be slight hard drive corruption - above guide should work to check that.

Does it work fine if you drop the FSB back to under 175? If so, I'd say you were just getting instability problems somewhere, or something couldn't handle the PCI speeds depending on divider. If not... hmm.. slight bios corruption perhaps?

[RIPUS]

I agree with Daemonfly, i had the same problem when i overclock my pc. My HDD (GXP 60) gives me this problem, the activity led stay on and nothing else to do then complete shutdown. A low level format and a drop of my o/c and everything came back nice. You should try without o/c then you will see if the problem is still there.

[nerdlogic]

Well, I was running fine at 165 (My mobo sets dividers like this: 133-165 = 1/4, 166-250 = 1/5) so it can't be a PCI problem. It happens when I run memtest and when I leave the BIOS, so I don't think it's Win2k...Any other suggestions?

[Daemonfly]

Only other things I can think of at the moment is to flash the BIOS or might be the PSU. I've seen PSUs cause similar, very odd problems. Do you have another you can temporarity substitute? The 175FSB could have just been a coincidence.

You wouldn't happen to have a "POST card" available, would you? (probably not)

If I had the PC here, I'd do a quick boot up on a Knoppix or Demo Linux CD, and try to do a warm-reboot from whithin those. That would tell me if it were dependant on the OS or not, but I'm thinking more along the lines of mobo/bios/PSU problem.

[nerdlogic]

I have no way of testing if it's my PSU ATM. I flashed my bios a while back. Think I should find a new revision & flash it again?

I'm just curious, what's a POST card?

Oh yeah, speaking of POST....it won't even go that far(well, i guess you guys figured that since no one asked. :p)

[Daemonfly]

Post card is a card that comes in either ISA or PCI versions that shows you what step the BIOS is currently at. Ususally as an alpha-numeric (2-digit hex) display. You can then look up the BIOS steps on their website and see where it's getting stuck at. Usually more detailed than beep codes.


As for flashing the BIOS, it's usually pretty easy, and could fix the problem, so shouldn't hurt to try it. Can't really think of much else, but then again, It's 3am & I'm half asleep here at work :P