Auto shutdown at Post

Hi,
Don't quite know what's happening with my tower. It was working fine a few weeks ago then it was shutdown and dismantled to be set up in the living room to use as the main comp for my home network for the printer, anyway got round to setting it up today and it has developed this issue... turned it on and was prompted with the windows repair screen,selected to repair and files loaded to win splash screen then tower shuts itself off, tried loads of times with the same results :cry.Tried booting without hdd/ram/gpu pcie/changed hdd and swapped ram around all with the same result, all fans are spinning through post. Starting to think it is a psu problem, especially when it is just shutting down ,it just dies :cry.

sytem specs to the best of my knowledge:-o)...

Win 7 Ultimate sp1.
AMD Dualcore athlon 4000+
2Gb Dual Channel ddr2 677mhz ram
160GB Sata HDD
Winpower ATX-450 450W psu
ECS HT2000 Motherboard

any insight/input to help me put this right will be greatly appreciated.

 

First guess would be Hard Disk. What brand HD is it? Im not ruling out PSU but given that you got the windows repair pop up sugests it has had some damage to the HD.

You could also try a Ubuntu Live CD boot to see if that helps.

 

I second Tueur's opinion. I've run into two PCs in the past month that went into an endless reboot cycle. In both cases, trying a new HDD solved the problem.

 

Thanks for the reply Tueur/gman.
I have tried booting with a spare drive that I have lying around, and got the same result, so took that as the drive is not at fault :confused. It's got me well baffled!! Tried also to boot it from win 7 OS disc got as far as windows splash then died again. I might try to format the drive and put XP on and see how that goes,I'm hopeful that it is something simple that I am over looking, I wonder if I need to reseal the CPU with some new paste, as the machine is around 5year old now!!
I will keep an eye here to see if there are any other solutions thrown into the mix.

 

One other tip: Try resetting the BIOS by unplugging the PC, removing the CMOS battery, waiting about 60 seconds then reinstalling it. This has worked once or twice for me in the past.

 

Thanks will try that tomorrow as it's getting late now.

 

5 year thermal paste could be an issue... that said if it was head I would expect it to need a cool down period. More likely is something on motherboard. Try Bios batt first but it could be south bridge or other part of chipset.

If you have a spare PSU kicking around give that a go. Might be worth giving memtest86 a go but I doubt its RAM.

 

I have sent it to my friend to have a look at it and see if he can sort it out for me, I will post back the results when I get the machine back.

Thanks for the input that you have given.

iain.t :major

 

UPDATE :--- Got my machine back from my friend still with the same issue, I have fiddled on lots n lots with it and managed to get it stay on long enough to run diagnostics on the drive... which totally failed all tests, took drive out, reset cmos, changed Ram, put a new(ish) drive back in, unplugged everything, still shutting itself off :cry, came to the conclusion that it is either my cpu or one of the chips on the board are failing, so hoping the bin feels hungry :-D or see if anyone wants to strip it down. Gutted "was" a great machine superfast, can't complain though I only paid £80.00 for it 4year ago.

Thanks to those that gave a bit input for me. :major

 

Might be worth checking out whether the chipset is over heating. Maybe try replacing thermal paste on the heatsink. The errors on the disk are probably from all the sudden power offs.

 

I'd still think it was overheating. Try running OCCT as it will torture test your machine. The good thing is that it will record some 15 parameters until it BSOD's. You've nothing to lose at this point. Post up the obvious gross deviants.

 

I will post back with results of OCCT in due course, might be later in the week as I'm a bit busy at the mo!!
Thanks for the suggestions though

 

Sorry for not getting back any quicker, (been having a bit of a torrid time at the mo), anyway resolved my auto shutdown issue by replacing the motherboard, got a second user of fleabay "Foxconn A74MX-K" £15.00, and it is running like a dream once again, just had to reload windows, still updating now :cry,installing 17 of 95 updates:-D:-D. Must have been a bad chip on the other board.
Just like to say THANKS to those that offered advice and support :major

 

Great!:major