Could This Be Bad RAM?

[hardwareguru84]

All Fixed. =)

 

[tweekah]

I suspect the PSU. Those normally go bad.
Try reseating the memory and other peripherals and booting with minimal hardware.

 

[stevenviola]

The same thing happened to me. After I installed a hard drive, the computer would not boot and do exactly what you described. I took the whole computer appart and figured out it was one of the 256 mb sticks of RAM. Because I had two, i removed one and lived with only one. About a week later, when i was tired of a slow computer, i put back the RAM i removed and the computer worked perfectly. IDK what the problem was, but I just gave it time and it worked.

 

[Daimyo]

Sounds like a bad stick of RAM. Bad RAM will usually give the random problems that you are seeing.

As Stevenviola said, try removing one stick and see if the problem persists. If so, switch them out and then try again. If you only have 1 stick you will either:
Need to buy/borrow a stick from a friend, or try you ram in another machine.

 

[hardwareguru84]

Well, I got some RAM from a different machine, and still getting the same problems on both board. Both have a different PSU, etc. and seems to freeze up during the POST process. With this second set of RAM, I now see a message on the Intel board of "Setup can find no bottable devices"...but the HDD and such are attached. Onlything different now is the graphics card, but I dont see how that could cause these peculiar problems, but I suppose it is possible.

 

[Fern]

Might try clearing the CMOS, what the h3ll

Fern

 

[hardwareguru84]

Found the problem...processor was shot.