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conmputer hangs at bios screen

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mrgreenjeans

Member
Joined
May 3, 2003
Location
Cleveland, GA
Any suggestions. When i booted this morning it ran chkdsk which kinda surprised me. I was browsing the internet, and mouse suddenly became inactive, then BSOd with page file error. When I try to reboot the post screen hangs at the bios showing memory check and stop. The hard drive light shows activity, but nothing happens. I had noticed yesterday that in explorer the icons for My computer were scrambled. Now it hangs at post.

What do you think: hard drive failure? bios battery? This is a P4C800e, not rig in sig, I had just uped from 2 512mb memory sticks to 2 1g and had just reinstalled windows and all that around three weeks ago. I've never had the bios post screen lock up. Could it be memory? need some help, this is my server rig with all my back up and data files stored onboard (separate drives) but need access. I'm wondering since the bios locked up if it could be problem with the new memory.
Help
 
Ok. after cooling for a spell, and power removed. it booted. although i did notice a clicking sound which is suggesting a drive failure. am I right? There aren't that many moving parts.
 
I've also noticed if you open 'my computer' all the drive icons are corrupted, scrambled. If you click they will still open, but very strange appearance. I'm backing up all my data files since I got it up. Mouse was rather slow on response and programs seem to take longer than usual to open. It is an older Mobo so i thought to replace the cmos battery couldn't hurt, but i'm still leaning toward drive failure. The impromptu chkdsk this morning is probably a strong indicator of drive failure......or not?

And page file error is referring to the cache on disc, correct, not the RAm memory?

I just reformatted and reinstalled on this drive three weeks ago or less. I really dread setting the damn thing up all over again. At least I've got an nLite install disk already made up for this installation. Still gotta configure all the settings and software again. :bang head
 
Actually a computer glich, I hit refresh when the browser hung and it must've created a second thread. I wondered what happened to the other comments I had made. Mods feel free to delete one or the other. honest mistake...At least the computer is still working!
 
OK. machine was running. Ran for about 4 hours and suddenly info message pops up- master boot record corrrupted, recovery successful. I think that's probably not good. as soon as I hit OK..BSOD..page file error. Tried to reboot and bios hangs after the hard drive screen. I kill the power and unplug from the wall. whle down, pull the new RAM and blow out the interior really well. Recheck all connections, and it starts up. windows takes a while to load but all comes up. I backed up files again, and shut down.
question: hard drive or what? I looked for a CMOS battery but only found a set of jumpers listed in the manual. I scanned the mobo but nothing resembling a battery stood out. I had MBR issues before and turned out to be a controller issue on the mobo. need some help.hate to buy a new drive and spend the time installing if that's not the issue!
 
Funny thing, maybe not at all what happened to you but:
My PC suddenly developed the same exact symptom. Frequently hang @ Mem check. By frequently I mean unless prior to boot I'd remove power cord, waited a bit and re-plugged. Then everything was peachy. But I could not just reset/restart without complete power down. Tested everything memory, PSU, HDD's, everything appeared fine.

Lived with this thing for ~4 months. 2 weeks or so ago, I needed to install 7 locally but was out of HDD space. I have the WD MyBook USB external, 320GB I used for media and file backup. So I canibalized the enclosure, yanked the drive and put it as a regular, internal SATA one. For some unexplained reason my computer now boots just fine. All the time, every time. Go figure.
 
I'm leaning towards a hard drive issue also. Th edrive isnt that old but as I mentioned earlier, there's an unusual clicking sound while the mouse hangs or the program hang then catches. the grayed out icons in 'My Computer' and the impromptu diskcheck I think are pinting to a new hard drive. hopefully I can get a clone program and copy it before it completely dies. I haven't tried rebooting since the once after I cleaned everything so I'll know later today whether it's gonna work or not. I'll keep the thread updated. If it still shows signs of being wonky, newegg shopping time! solid state? Hmmm?
 
Started back up immediately this afternoon. Boot time was interminable for a recent install but I figure it could've been the series of BSOD's without a standard shut down, that cn scramble the MBR some times. I didn't want to launch 'til I was going o be around to watch it so we'll see how it goes.
Like I said yesterday, last crash I took the suggestion and reseated and blew out the RAM sockets and also checked all the hard drive wiring thinking I might have loosened something there also. All data's backed up so no crisis in either case, just aggravation.
Thanks again for the input. I'll keep it updated.
 
Can you run a checkdisk with the drive in another pc? Or from a bootcd that's the easier way to check the drive.
 
When it ran check disk at the start of all this there were a ton of errors. And even though its still up, it seems as if everything is taking a while to load. Firefox is taking 20-30 seconds when it used to be like 2-3 seconds. Gonna keep watching it.

Does anyone recommend a decent chkdsk program I can put on a .iso and run upon boot?
 
Well so far its been up for 5 1/2 hours. I wanted to throw something at it so launched Illustrator on one screen and Photoshop on the other and pulled in worked on some network files. Scratch is set up on a different drive, so if this didn't give it workout what would? Anyway, performed well except when I was done and explorer locked up on the network folder I was working out of. But the machine recovered and didn't crash. Good Thing. Oh well, it might've been dust on the RAM or a loose hard drive cable. fingers crossed. Oh, and the icons in 'my Computer' are still scrambled????

Thanks for all the suggestions.
 
OK. following day and still running. My guess (and hope) it was I either a loosened connection or had some dust in a RAM slot 'cause she's still humming along. I was back in Illustrator last night working on a project and it ran no problems. Thanks again for your help.
 
Should've could've would've! Finally died for good. ran almost constantly since this weekend with nary a burp. Was in the middle of some homework this afternoon and crash. Let it cool and this time I get bios error, drive dead. :bang head

New drive on order. If i had done this earlier I probably could've cloned it, now I doubt I can access it and salvage the data. Most is backed up.:confused:
 
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