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Intermittent POST failures...

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iAmCodeMonkey

Member
Joined
Mar 4, 2009
Location
Somewhere On Midgard...
Hey guys,

A rather alarming boot problem with my rig has developed over the past few days, and I am wondering whether it is my motherboard or boot drive (my Velociraptor). The issues I am now having are as follows:

1) The system has failed to POST twice, and each time it fails I can hear a weird sounding noise coming from my boot drive, almost as if the hard drive electronics are failing. I end up having to power down the system using my PSU's power switch, since all that ends up happening is a blank screen and boot drive noise. Yet, all fans power up, all motherboard LED's show up as normal, and my graphics card is getting power just fine. This has started happening randomly.

2) When I try to boot up again, my computer ends up POSTing as normal, but instead of booting into Windows 7 as it usually does, it displays this wonderful looking error message:

*Warning: System BOOT Fail*
Your system last boot fail or POST interrupted
Please enter setup to load default and reboot again.
F1 to continue
DEL to enter Setup

When I see this message, I can press F1 and boot into Windows normally. I have ran chkdsk on my boot drive, which showed no errors in the file system and zero bad sectors on the disk. The system runs perfectly fine after this point.

I do use my system basically every day, and I have owned my motherboard for a good four years. What should my next course of action be if this happens again?

Cheers,
CodeMonkey :D
 
So, is it failing to post or is it failing to see the drive and get to windows? They are two different things... If a pc fails to post I don't see a thing on the screen. Sounds like you ate having a sucessful post until you get to the drive?

Do you have another drive to test an os on? When you get to windows does it find any errors?
 
So, is it failing to post or is it failing to see the drive and get to windows? They are two different things... If a pc fails to post I don't see a thing on the screen. Sounds like you are having a successful post until you get to the drive?

Do you have another drive to test an os on? When you get to windows does it find any errors?

When I turn the PC on, it is trying to POST but the boot drive is fouling up (I have isolated that component due to the abnormally loud noise it made), causing it to sit there and initially not POST. I do not see anything on the screen. It happened this morning, and I noticed that it would just st there and do nothing, apart from powering up everything connected to the board.

I hear no beeps from the PC speaker at all.

When I try to power the PC on again, I see the System Boot failed error message, presumably because I was forced to power it off mid-POST or something like that.

It is kind of hard for me to explain, and I do not have another drive to test an OS on. Also, I ran check disk within Windows, and no errors were reported, not even any bad sectors.

I hope this helps.
 
What you describes sounds like a drive problem to me, hardware failure of the drive.
 
What you describes sounds like a drive problem to me, hardware failure of the drive.

Yeah, I figured that. I have all important data backed up onto an external drive right now, and my 1Tb drive is running perfectly fine.

Fingers crossed it will last until year's end. If it does, I may move on to either an SSD if my chipset supports it, or another 1Tb Caviar Green partitioned in half. Wish me luck! :D
 
I would be surprised if it lasts until the end of the year.

Your chipset should support SSD if it presently supports SATA. It will just see it like any other SATA drive.
 
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