The Scottish Boinc Team

I did a silly thing and unplugged the wrong plug on the power strip and the pc turned off. Now when I try and boot up the power light on the front of the case flashes and I hear the fan spin up for a second but then nothing, this keeps on repeating every 5 seconds or so.

I've tried unplugging it and leaving it for a bit but that doesn't seem to have helped. Is it possible the psu might have blown and it would be a simple case of replacing it ?

Intel E8400 Dual Core Processor
Asus P5K-E Wifi Edition Motherboard
Arctic Cooler Freezer Pro 7
nVidia GeForce 8800GTX (768mb)
Creative X-FI Xtreme Soundcard
2x1GB Corsair Dominator PC2-8500 (1066MHz)
750GB Samsung Sata2 HD753L HDD
320GB Sata Internal HDD
19" WS Hanns-G TFT
Antec P182 Case
Hiper Type-R Modular 580W PSU


Updated: Tried a different power cord and not luck, also tried removing the mobo power connectors, turning on the power and pressing the power button to flush residual power, no luck.

Update 2: Tried the PSU in my old setup and it runs the comp fine so I'm thinking the PSU is fine.

Could the mobo be the problem ? I don't have any other boards that would take the ram and cpu to test. I might have to try and RMA it as it's not really that old.

Do you get any video output on screen at all?

It doesn't even get as far as the POST as it only powers up for like a second. It then continually does this until I disconnect the power.

It doesn't even get as far as the POST as it only powers up for like a second. It then continually does this until I disconnect the power.

I had this a while ago and (I'm sorry to say) ended up replacing the mobo. Luckily, it was still covered and so the supplier did it for me for free. The only other option I can think of is faulty memory but a quick power up with the RAM removed should confirm that one way or teh otehr...

HTH,
MacDitch

Just an idea: corrupt bios?

Turn the machine off at the wall - remove the coin cell battery backup from the mobo, then press the power button to drain any caps in the psu and mobo (still without any mains power), finally switch on at the wall and try to boot.

Does it boot up now?

If it does boot, it will complain about bad bios. Load bios defaults for now, and boot the OS, then shutdown cleanly. Re-insert the batter backup and boot again. The bios will still complain because last time you shutdown there was no battery backup, so now go ahead and setup the bios the way you like it.

I had a similar experience on mu P5K-E mobo. The first few times I was able to recover it by reseting the BIOS with the jumpers, which are cleverly hidden under the graphics card.

You may have to also do a BIOS recovery using a USB memory key with a good BIOS version on it to reflash the BIOS.

Also I just noticed that you have 1066 RAM. My P5K-E didn't like that. I had to put in just one stick of DDR2-800 to allow it to recover, redo all the BIOS stiings and go from there.

Ian

I swapped out the psu to my old system and managed to get that to boot with it so I confirmed the psu was fine. I also had to swap out the graphics to the old system so that meant I then had access to the bios reset pins (My 8800gtx completely covers it).

Good news is after putting the system back together it did indeed boot up, I reset the bios to default settings for now and things seem to be running fine. I'll have to watch what I do in future as next time I might not be so lucky.

Glad you managed to get it back up and running again. :)

Good to hear you are back up and running. I spent a whole weekend once having to take the graphics card out, reset the BIOS, rinse and repeat, until I got it working again.

Ian

One last thought. Be sure there are no non-system cd's or dvd's in any of those drives. It may be trying to boot off of one of those instead of the HD. If that isn't it, I'm voting for CMOS/bios reset. Something has changed since last re-boot and CMOS/bios doesn't know about it.

I don't think it would be the CD as it didn't even get that far by the sounds of it.

However, did you try to over clock any component at any time? That could be a possible reason.

I did have the cpu overclocked to 3.36GHz and Lord of the Rings: Two Towers dvd was in the drive (as I was watching that film at the time). But the problem occured when I pulled the power plug for the computer instead of my xbox360 plug.

I'm not sure if there is something on the motherboard that prevents damage to it on power loss but resetting the bios did fix the problem.

I wouldn't have thought that just pulling the power would have caused an upset, but then again... Technology eh?

i once had a motherboard that would throw a fit about 1 in every 10 restarts. it would just fail to boot and require a bios reset (well it was a 1.6ghz athlon which ran at 2.4ghz all its life)

my solution then was just to leave it running 24/7 crunching boinc and i only retired it about 4 months ago after 5 years of hard graft lol

some systems are just weird.

might be worth checking to see if the machine has any bios updates incase there is a knon bug with the current one.