Self build system unstable

[Zak33]

is there ANY chance that it's an on board graphics or sound card driver issue?

Can you stick a graphics card in, wih latest drivers, and disable on board graphics AND sound and try from there?

[peterb]

One other thing to look at is the SATA cable. The cable sockets can develop hairline cracks (it has happened to me twice) and they can cause intermittent connection problems, which could lead to the symptoms you describe.

And - funny old thing, I came to start up my Linux system yesterday, and it would run Grub from the disk, but not boot off the system partition, so, I pulled it apart and changed the SATA cable - and for the first time in over a year, it booted first time.

Coincidence? Don't know?

Why one partition on the disk but not the other? Don't know.

Will it solve your problem? Don't know.

Is it worth trying - for the cost of a cable? YES!!

It isn't the first time I've fixed odd and random boot and system crashes by putting in a different SATA cable.

[DerbyJon]

OK, quick update. This afternoon I swapped out both SATA cables for new ones and moved from the SATA1&2 ports to SATA3&4 on the motherboard.

That didn't improve matters, so I've now stolen the PSU from my main stable PC and am running the new build from that. Just started testing.

[Zak33]

you've not come back so I guess it's fixed?

[DerbyJon]

Nope, 'fraid not. Things looked good for 6 reboots, then 2 of the next 4 reboots went bad at some point.

I pulled a HDD out of an old PVR and started trying to use that to gradually swap out every new component in the system. However I hit problems and then ran out of time again unfortunately.

[ty2010]

If it's completely stable one boot, not the next and the hdd has been ruled out there is a problem in the bios posting. Check the MB battery, set a 1-2 sec delay for hdd spinup, reseat processor. Two other possibilities are borderline OC settings, it boots into unstable OC then reverts to default on error and reboot, power down and it repeats OR it's hanging on a legacy usb device during boot. Wife's laptop would do the last one if a mouse was plugged in, lived with that for 3 months until a bios update was available.