Computer freezes on start-up

[jiffy007]

I've got an Athlon 900mHz system running Windows ME, and for some reason it's begun to lock-up while booting up. It's not consistent - sometimes it will freeze right after the video card has been recognized, other times it will get past the drive identification part. When it freezes, both lights on my CD-Rom drive light up, the monitor blinks off, and I have no keyboard controls, and I can't manually restart the system by hitting the reset button (I have to flip the switch in the rear to kill the power supply). Can anyone help???

 

[crisp82]

Have you recently overclocked any part of you're system, i.e, changed the FSB to 133mhz instead of 100mhz in the bios? If this is the case, clear you're CMOS. There will be a jumper on you're motherboard that will do this for you, it is normally located by the PCI slots, on it's own. If you have the manual, it will list it for you. This should solve the problem (hoipefully, as it worked for me with a 1.1ghz athlon). You will have to enter the Date, Time etc, and you're going to have to enter you're bios settings.

Hope this works for ya!

Good Luck,

Chris

 

[jiffy007]

Thanks for the tip. I haven't made any modifications to my system recently, but I tried clearing the CMOS anyway, and it unfortunately didn't resolve the problem. Has anyone encountered a similar problem with their system, or know what I need to do to get it up and running again?

 

[WW]

what motherboard? what hard drive?

how old is the system?

have you recently installed any new hardware?

 

[jiffy007]

The system is about 12 months old, the motherboard is the K7T Pro2-A, and the hard drive is a Maxtor 40gb 5400 rpm drive - although since the system locks up before loading any software, I don't think the hard drive is an issue. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[WW]

it sounds like a hardware conflict, but you haven't changed anything recently....are there any conflicts (yellow exclamation points, red x's) in the device manager?

when it freezes, if you hold in the power button for five seconds will it reboot? (not the reset button).



when in doubt :

update your bios

update to ver 4.38 via 4 in 1 drivers

 

[WW]

oh, and check your RAM with goldmemory or memtest86 just to rule out memory problems.

 

[Daxxax]

First make sure all your cables are properly seated, maybe even unplug them and reseat them all.
Next get it down to a minimum config only the parts that are required ie:ram and video. I would unplug anything that does not need to be running like the cd-rom or hard drive and any other peripherals that you have. If she still won't go try borrowing parts from a known good system, actually I'd try a new power supply first. the trick is to first make sure it's not a reseat problem and then to narrow it down to which part is the culprit, just be careful with ESD.