Selective Posting

[KalC]

Alright people,

My system is acting up a bit in the form of posting when it wants to.

Basically what happens is that when i power the computer up SOMETIMES it decides not to post and just stays on the BIOS screen. From here i am forced to flick the switch on the power supply off and then on again which does actually fix the problem.

Just wanted to know the possible answers as to why it posts selectively? If anyone could shed any light that would be great

[Craig321]

What part of the POST does it freeze on? RAM? Hard drives?

Craig.

[KalC]

It gets as far as the ASUS Logo screen. From there i am forced to switch off the power and start again and it works fine.

[DougMcDonald]

The asus boards tend to do this when a bad overclock occurs, are you overclocking?

If not, it suggest bad board, I may be wrong though, how old is it?

[Agent]

What PSU are you using?
This is known as 'cold booting', and is often caused by a bad PSU.

[KalC]

The asus boards tend to do this when a bad overclock occurs, are you overclocking?

If not, it suggest bad board, I may be wrong though, how old is it?

Its only a year old and i haven't overclocked anything yet

[KalC]

What PSU are you using?
This is known as 'cold booting', and is often caused by a bad PSU.

Oh i see, im using the corsair 520W (http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/114945)

I was recommended to buy that!

[Agent]

Stands a good chance its not the PSU, unless you've been really unlucky and have a faulty one.

[vinnyT]

Often used to be that the bios would hang at this stage because the, boot, harddrive hadn't spun up to operating speed. However, I've not heard of this for a long time and figuered that newer drives didn't suffer from this.

I would make sure that I had a reliable (and verified) backup of important data, emails, software passwords, etc. as it may be an indication of impeeding harddrive failiure. Of course it may not, but always good to have a backup

[Dingo]

Have you run any diagnostics on the memory or used other memory to check that it is not that causing the problem?.

When you get into Windows have a look at the time and see if it is correct as it might be the BIOS battery dying, I had one once which caused similar problems, and I verified this by resetting some items in BIOS and seeing if it kept the changes on reboot.

Alternatively, if you have added any new software recently it could be a driver related issue.

Worse case scenario will be your cpu on it's way out!!