Startup Trouble - Speculations Please

C

Crimsonnaire

Member
Hi, everyone.

Recently my Dell GX270 (Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz, 512MB RAM, 120GB HDD) is having trouble start up. At various times after pushing the power button (different time intervals, but always before desktop loadup), the system shuts down (or reboots), making a beep followed by the CD-ROM spinning sound for a second time (first time is right after pushing power button, which is normal). At this point, the power is still on, but there's [no] processing activity [or monitor feed]. However, upon a successful startup after several tries, the PC runs normally without any signs of a problem, and the system will remain so until I shut it off and try to turn it on again; this problem always happen when first turning on the tower...

If you have any guesses or opinions as to the source of the problem, I'd appreciate it greatly if you can share them with me.

Thanks for looking, and have a safe and happy New Year's.
 
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Try entering the bios immediately when you boot. If that works you eliminate the power supply as being the source of your problem. And check the settings while you are in there. Might also try replacing the mobo battery. Some boards require a good one in order to function properly, and they do regain some charge if left alone long enough. As regards RAM, I had that problem on this machine. The RAM was slightly defective, and though it would work OK if the timings were slightly slowed down, (i.e. 1 clock slower than the default settings), using the "De Fault" settings resulted in boots into black screens, BSODs, system crashes, programs encountering problems and abruptly closing, etc. There is also the possibility that you have an HDD problem which is preventing the machine from booting. If your HDD is an IDE drive you can check it using THDD, which is a very good freeware program for checking and to some extent repairing HDDs. (It is capable of remapping the drive to exclude bad sectors so that scandisk doesn't even see them; and also gives you a graph of read time for the entire drive which shows damaged, but still working sectors, but it doesn't work on SATA drives.) I would reccomend that you backup everything important to you the next time you succeed in getting it working, just in case it is an HDD problem with the drive being on the brink of complete failure.
 
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Thank you both for the suggestions.

I managed to start the Dell onto the BIOS page on the first try, no problem, although my keys were nonresponsive with the exception of the space bar at first. After pressing a whole bunch of keys, I got the rest to work properly--have no idea what was about. So this effectively rules out the power supply, which I'm kinda glad cause I hate messing with that thing. I guess I'm down to the HDD and memory: this would be the RAM, correct? Also, is it unlikely that the problem is actually with the CPU? If not, is there a way to check its stability without changing it? Cause come to think of it, it does seem to run unusually slow at times. A friend of mine, who's familiar with the Pentiums, remarked that my Dell is slow for a Pentium 4 with 3GHz, despite only 512MB of RAM. I always find it slowing down when I try to access files stored on the HDD (using Windows Explorer) with the Internet Explorer open and having visited several sites (the heavier the sites, the slower the Windows Explorer). The Windows Explorer would just take an inordinate amount of time to open, but has also completely frozen before and requiring a manual End Task Now command. However, if the IE is closed, the WE is fast and loads files almost instantaneously. I didn't find this particularly troubling because I get around it every time, but it is indeed anomalous.

I did a search for THDD and found several leads to download sites listing numerous files in parts, the cumulative filesize being around 100MB. Do all these 'parts' make up this freeware program? As for testing the memory, should I get just pull it out and try the computer with a replacement card?
 
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A new development that just occurred: Today when I first turned on the PC, the same rebooting/shutdown happened twice, and the third time I was taken to that dreaded black screen with the white font saying "We're sorry, but Windows did not boot properly. A recent change in hardware or software might've caused this, etc." A few seconds after this first error screen, the system rebooted/shut down to a black screen as described in the first post, then the second time I got this screen, I selected "Start Windows with the last known good configuration," and it booted right up with no problem...
 
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