Rebooting Cycle..

[CyStar]

First off, my specs:

AMD Athlon 800mhz CPU (non overclocked)
Abit KA7 Mainboard
two 128mb Seiman's PC-100 SDRAM
15.2gig Western Digital 7200 HD
8gig Western Digital 5200 HD
Creative Labs GeForce 2 GTS
Diamond MX300
RealMagic Mpeg DVD Hardware decoder card (pci)
NetGear FA310TX NIC
Generic Acer 40x CD-Rom
Toshiba 5x DVD-Rom
250w powersupply.

The problem I've having is that the system continually reboots on it's own. The system will power up and then, all of a sudden, black screen and then I see my video card's bios.

Do I need a 300w power supply or something? I'm running the exact same components now on an FIC SD-11 board and have zero problems at all. All my peripherals are using the latest drivers. Also, it will even reboot during the boot sequence, before even processessing a driver.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I have a second problem with my fiancee's PC, about the same specs, the cd rom is different and she has an extra burner and one less HD. Her PC has no stability problems except when I hit the power button I hear a series (or one long continueous) loud beep from the PC speaker. I know the beeps are coded for issues like Keyboard or video, but I'm not sure I've heard this one before. It just beeps I believe 3 short times. It then remains on a black screen and tries to boot (w/o me seeing it). I turn the power off, turn it on again, same beeps and errors. The third time however that I turn it off and on again, it reboots just fine.

Any help from you all would save me alot of time and money! =) Thanks in advance!

 

[CyStar]

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[Tonec]

Don't know if its a power issue but considering the quality of the other components it would be worthwhile to invest in a high quality power supply. Do you have a lot of fans powered by motherboard headers, I've always used 4 pin with athlon mobos because of the power issue.
http://www.plycon.com/power.htm
not exactly cheap but about the best you can buy, should be able to find it cheaper


I had a similar beeping problem on an Asus K7M, fixed by disabling ALL hardware monitoring in the bios. That was a known issue on this particular board, might help in your case too.

 

[IonBlade]

According to a sheet that I printed from the internet a few months ago, three beeps from a BIOS means that there is an error in the first 64kb of memory in the system. Try to reseat the memory in its slot or to switch the slots that the memory is in. Hopefully this can help you out.

Shawn

 

[Durron]

I've seen the same problems with many systems (mostly Athlons). A good 300watt power supply fixed every single one. (Including the Celeron system which surprised me but whatever).

 

[CyBOrz PaCe]

Does sound very much like a powersupply problem.

Also sounds like a situation where the Video card is not seated properly. Double check the video card and make sure it is pushed all the way down.

CyBOrz

AMI BIOS beep codes

1 beep - DRAM refresh failure
2 beeps - Parity Circuit Failure
3 beeps - Base 64K RAM failure
4 beeps - System Timer Failure
5 beeps - Processor Failure
6 beeps - Keyboard Controller / Gate A20 Failure
7 beeps - Virtual Mode Exception Error
8 beeps - Display Memory Read/Write Failure
9 beeps - ROM BIOS Checksum Failure
10 beeps - CMOS Shutdown Register Read/Write Error

For 1 beep, 2 beeps, or 3 beeps try reseating the memory first. If the error still occurs, replace the memory with known good chips/SIMM's

 

[CyStar]

Thanks for the replies!! I've actually narrowed it down to a bad GeForce 2 GTS video card Sucks too, but tomorrow I'm off to CompUSA to exchange it. Thankfully I had my old trusty but dusty V3 2k for backup..

Thanks again everyone!

I did get an Antec 300w case and powersupply tho, just to be sure.