my computer wouldnt boot!

[Catastrophz]

i have my computer spec listed in my profile.

i was using my computer earlier this morning then turned it off when i left the house and came back later in the evening just to find out that it wouldnt boot up. the motherboard's posted error code shows "37" which defined as "Check DMA Channel 1" in the manual. i have no idea what that mean. ok, so i keep trying it over and over for at least 10 times and finally it booted. then i turned it off to see if it'd function normally, no, it wouldnt boot. so i went to some forums and a guy suggested reseting the BIOS by removing the MB's back up battery and i did and whala, it worked again! so i turned it off and attempt to reboot it again, nope, not rebooting. so basically it's out of whack! i have no idea what's going on. my only conclusion is something's wrong with the MB.

Note: i just recently bought an Antec Nine Hundred Gaming case and moved switched it over. it has five 120mm LED fans (4 are LED) plus the humongous one on the top of the case. it was working fine for a week since i switched to that case and after i changed the DVD-RW nasty old style wide cable with the round one and it started acting up.

Thanks in advance.

[ABIT Sean]

Please try the following.
Disconnect everything apart from the CPU+heatsink, RAM & Graphics card.

Power on the system, if the motherboard posts ok you then proceed to connect all other devices one at a time.

Every time you connect a new device power on the system.

Hopefully this should track down the fault.

[Catastrophz]

what do you mean? like, how would i know which one is causing the malfunction?


Edit: lol, nvm! what's the *OK* code? 01?

[medsussex]

I have an Athlon 2400 running Windows XP and have a similar problem. First time it happened I had to repair XP with the system disc to replace a lost system file. I had similar problems again - but getting worse with time until the bios wouldn't even recognise it as a hard drive. So I plugged the hard drive into another computer to attempt to transfer the files. As I went through this, more and more files became corrupted, and I only managed to retrieve about 10%. I did a virus scan with up-to-date Norton, which was clear. I think that the air seal on the hard drive case had gone, letting in microspopic dust which contaminated the discs and corrupted the files. As the hard drive heats up it expels air, and as it cools down it draws it in - so the problem was progressive and got worse every time the computer was turned off. Before I bin the hardrive (and all those irreplaceable files) - has anyone got another explanation?