Need some trouble shooting help plz.

In July of last year, I built a budget system with the following:

Gigabyte: GA-MA790X-UD4P
AMD: Phenom X3 8750 Toliman
Antec TPQ-850 850W PSU
BFG Tech BFGE98512GTXPOCBE GeForce 9800 GTX+
Mushkin: 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
WD: RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB
WD: WD360GD-75GHAO Raptor X2

Everything is new, except the 2 Raptors.
The system was running great for five or six months. I have one Raptor with Win XP, and the other Raptor with Ubuntu. I was burning some CD's, and things got all weird. Some cd's burned with no issue but half the songs were missing. This was with XP. The system started to crash a few times, so I booted Ubuntu and the system was fine. After that, I went back to XP and it locked up IN the bios. Then nothing.

I replaced the CMOS battery, tried a different PSU, different hard drive, swapped memory around in different slots (with the Mushkin ram) and I get nothing. One thing I did notice was the fan on the video card was pulsing (like a heart beat) with fan at low rpm's.I have never had anything like this happen before. I suspect either the mobo or vid card. I don't have extra hardware to swap stuff around.

I would love some advice before I start throwing new parts at it.

 

Odd for it to lock up in the BIOS.

Do I understand correctly in that it will no longer boot into Ubuntu either?

 

Off the top of my head . . .

Check the hard-drives . . . you said they were used. Any jumpers on those drives? The first SATA drives had a 1.5gb data speed . . . newer drives are capable of 3.0gb data speed and have a jumper that is applied if the board they are installed on only supports the lower speed. Intel chip-sets auto-negotiate the speed, while VIA and SIS chipsets require the jumber be applied. I don't know for sure about AMD chipsets. Probably won't make a difference, but it's something to check.

Try unplugging first one, then the other drive, and see if one will boot without the other powered up.

I was going to suggest changing the drive settings in BIOS - if the board is set to AUTO find your drives, change it to manual and input the drive info. But you can't get into BIOS now, you said.

 

I am curently in the final stages of trouble shooting a problem on a pc whose symptoms included freezes at various stages of boot. The freeze could occur at any time (also, this problem began virtually from one day to the next).

It would freeze at the post screen (sometimes with part of the page displayed), at the bios screen (sometimes with part of the bios page displayed), at the stage just pre-desktop, you get the picture. At first these symptoms were intermittent but grew in frequency.

The symptoms initially started intermittently with the screen just going blank, so of course I suspected the vga or psu.

I replaced vga and ram, cleared cmos and replaced battery, then finally changed the mobo and psu. Problems remained.

I finally changed the cpu. All the problems disappeared.

I have replaced most of the original components so at this stage the only 2 that are new are mobo and cpu. Now, I am still in a testing phase with this pc and it is shortly my intention to replace the mobo with the original one to confirm that it was in fact the cpu that was at fault.

However, I still suspect just the cpu simply because as I stated above, when I replaced the mobo but kept the original the cpu, the freezes continued.

I searched the hell out looking for posts or comments about pcs frezing in the bios as mine (and yours do/did) and found nothing.

I know that you have stated that the fan to the vga was kinda pulsing, I am not sure but it could very be a by product of the faulty cpu.

I appreciate that you do not have spare parts readily at hand and would have to purchase them. Personally, I would acquire the cheapest used cpu that would fit your board from ebay and try that first.

Good Luck

 

My hard drives do not have jumpers,I swapped in different drives,sata, as well as ide drive. The system will not boot at all.

Edit:When this started happening it would freeze randomly, and the last time it did it froze in the BOIS and then not at all.

 

Well, you were right! The cpu was bad. I picked up the cheapest cpu off E-bay (a Sempron 2.7) for $40 new. Did the trick, Thank You!!!!

 

You're welcome.

The symptoms you were experiencing were so similar to ones I had (especially the freezing in bios) I thought I would spare you all the hassle that I went through in finding the fault (which at first looked remarkably like a mobo failure).

I have also just replaced the mobo with the original one (keeping the new cpu) and all is fine.

Good Luck

 

I have built around 30 or so systems in the span of 10-12 years and all were built with AMD CPU's. This is the first time that I have had an issue with them. I think that's pretty damn good! In fact, I have only had a few hardware failures. A psu, video card, and a hdd and that's about it.

 

A little update. I contacted AMD's RMA service. I gave them all the info they asked for (the issue,troubleshooting, I linked to this thread) and they approved me to send the processor to them postage prepaid via. FedEx. I must say, I am impressed with their service.

 

Seems like a result.

You can also probably put the Sempron back out on ebay and more or less break even on the whole deal.

Good Luck