Strange issue that I couldn't figure out...

My fellow techs and I recently ran into an issue that none of us could figure out. Nobody on our company forums had an answer for it either. The lady finally just got tired of messing with it and bought a new computer as she needed it to run her business (which was probably for the best anyway, her machine was pretty old) but it's been bugging me and I'm just trying to figure out if anybody has ever seen something like this. Let me explain.

This thing was having a pretty strange boot issue. Wouldn't boot to Windows, wouldn't boot to safe mode, wouldn't boot to any boot disks we tried, nothing. It would power on, the first screen would come up where you can enter the BIOS/Boot Menu/Recovery partition, etc... but then it got weird. It seems like if you tried to boot into any GUI type environment it would just die. The machine would power itself off. But if you tried to boot into a text based interface it would stay on.

For example, when trying to boot into Windows it would get to the loading screen, and then die after about 10 seconds. If you hit F8 and went to that menu, it would work fine and stay on for a while, but as soon as you picked an option (Repair your computer, safe mode, safe mode with networking, etc...) it would try to load up for about 10 seconds or so and then shut itself off. We tried to boot from our company PE and it was the same issue. The text based boot menu worked fine. As soon as you tried to boot into the GUI based PE though, it would look like it was working for about 10 seconds and then shut itself down. We were able to run our diagnostic program on it, which is DOS based and takes about 3 hours to run on most machines. It finished and reported no issues with hardware.

We pulled the HDD, and could still see all the files so we went ahead and backed it up for the client. We were still thinking it had to be hardware based and that our diagnostic program was just wrong, so we tried pulling/swapping hardware components one by one to see if we could isolate the problem. Plugged in a new power supply, same thing. Swapped out the RAM, same thing. Swapped SATA/IDE cables, nothing. Changed out the CMOS battery, and reset the BIOS to defaults, same thing. Pretty much we changed everything but the motherboard and the processor.

As a last resort before she decided to scrap it and buy a new one she gave us the go ahead to try and reinstall Windows to see if that would fix the issue since she had all her data backed up so we went for it. It originally had Vista installed on it but all she could find was an old XP disk she had bought a while ago and said she didn't care if we used that, she just needed something that was going to work. We put the Windows XP disk in to see if it would let us do anything. It booted to the first DOS based menu with the blue background and white text where you can choose/edit partitions etc... We were able to format the drive and repartition it, but as soon as XP tried to load the GUI based portion of the installation it would look like it was working for about 10 seconds and then it would power off.

At that point we figured that our diagnostic software was wrong and that the problem had to be either in the motherboard or the CPU, that we didn't have the parts to fix it and would have to order them (which would put her without her machine for probably another week or so), and that doing so was probably going to be close to the cost of buying a new PC anyway. She thanked us for our time and trouble, and decided to buy a new machine and have her data files transferred over.

Diagnostic software we used for testing was Eurosoft PC-Check, Sea Tools for DOS, Memtest86+, Chkdsk /f /r, Windows Memory Diagnostic, onboard diagnostics in the BIOS.

I'm just wondering, aside from swapping out the mobo and the CPU is there anything else we could have done or something we missed? I've never seen anything like that. :confused

Still just a lowly n00b trying to learn as much as I can. :-D

 

Hmm, quick reply before I hit the sack: I'd suspect the 'board not supplying enough juice for the gfx chipset (or the PCI-E/AGP slot if an ext.card - didn't see it mentioned) or the gfx chip being faulty.

To test, dig out a working PCI card, if that works, try PCI-E or AGP. If it doesn't work, it's probably something else - call a priest ^^

Looks like you were pretty thorough in testing and detailing it though, nice work.