long pause during post

[glugglug]

Ever since moving, my main PC pauses for a long time (90 seconds or so) on the post screen, where it tells you to press Del for setup or F11 for the boot menu, before it even figures out what kind of RAM there is. If you press del to go to the BIOS options, it goes there after the long pause. The RAM check is also slower than normal. Once it gets past this slow post, it runs normally. Well almost normally..... ATIMMC crashes frequently when I am using the TV functionality of the All-in-wonder. The TV keeps playing/recording while this happens, until I click the button for it to send/not send the error report to MS.

Anyone know what could be causing these delays during post, or the ATIMMC crashes? Could the 2nd be it not liking my new cable provider?

 

[jackschmittusa]

Usually when a computer stalls and then offers to let you go into setup, there is either a checksum error (which in most cases means the mb battery is going), or it recieves a response that it does not understand when it polls the hardware. I would reseat the ram sticks and cards in the machine (which might have come loose in the move) and verify that it keeps good time (a battery issue if it does not).

 

[beatle]

I'd run Memtest86 overnight to see if your ram is bad.

 

[glugglug]

I tried resetting the BIOS to defaults, both from the menu option, and then with the jumper - neither way fixed the pause.

Then I re-seated the RAM, the video card, and the wireless card. No dice. Looked at the D-bracket during the boot, and the stage it stops on the four lights look like this:

Red____Green
Green__Red

I looked this up in the motherboard manual (MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum, and it says this stage is "Processor Initialization". But in the last line to appear on the screen at this point, it already says Athlon 64 3500+, so it already has determined what the processor is. Have not tried re-seating the CPU because:
a) what a PITA that would be, and
b) if the CPU wasn't secure wouldn't it fail to boot at all?

If I enable the memory test at boot, this pause is BEFORE the memory test.

 

[plummer66]

i ran into a problem like this once before and it was a faulty (or flakey) burner. Just to double check, why don't you unplug your cd drives and see if that solves the problem. Good luck.

 

[Propellorhead]

I had the exact same problem with my shuttle a couple weeks ago. I was playing my favorite online FPS when the computer just locked up, and since would take forever (actually about a minute or so) to get out of POST. My solution? Reset the CMOS. Problem solved after that. BTW I was using an ATI card at the time. 9600se.

 

[glugglug]

You'll never guess what the problem turned out to be....

I had a USB CF flash-card reader plugged in with no flash card in it. It registers as a 0MB USB mass storage device. The BIOS tries to check if this 0K USB drive is bootable and of course all the reads on it fail. Removing this (or putting a flash card in the reader) seems to fix the ATIMMC crashes and the flaky behavior the remote control was exhibiting as well. (Remote control receiver is also USB)