On the first day of Christmas Santa gave to me/Major hardware failure [solved]

Skeith

(cross posting from Moe's) I put this computer together last year, and have had almost no problems with it (and those were caused by yours truly). It's going into a restart loop when I try to power it on-- everything spins up, stops, and tries again. I've tried swapping out the PSU for a spare, but the voltage on the spare is lower than on my normal one, and I got the same results. Any suggestions on how to proceed? I'm bringing my old rig out of retirement for the nonce, but I didn't want to spend my winter break deprived of my tank.

edit- no posting of any sort, either. Monitor stays blank too. Though, it did get far enough on the normal PSU that I could log in, but it restarted as I was typing in my password.

iRevert

Can you access BIOS before the reboot kicks in?

If so can you sit in BIOS for a long time (longer than the reboots would take to kick in?)

Bendery It Like Beckham

Check for bad capacitors. Disconnect everything 1 part at a time till you get post.

If you remove everything and it still wont post, bad mobo

Skeith

iRevert wrote: »

Can you access BIOS before the reboot kicks in?

If so can you sit in BIOS for a long time (longer than the reboots would take to kick in?)

Except for the one time it reached the login screen, it hasn't made it to the BIOS screen. I'm going to go part-by-part later tonight and see if something changes, as per Bendery and a friend's suggestion.

iRevert

It really honestly sounds like a bad PSU to me, even if it were a boot order issue or a bad HDD it would still at least make it to post.

Strip the mobo of the GPU(s) and check to make sure the ram is seated, then start looking for popped caps.

EDIT:

Also double check the cables are plugged in all the way, this includes the 24pin and 4 pin as well as the actual power cable going into your PSU and the wall.

Skeith

Cable connections were solid when I took it all apart, but we'll find out if that was the case when I start tinkering.

Bendery It Like Beckham

Also, check your motherboard risers against the map it came with, could be shorting to the case.

Skeith

Same results as before. Tested it with only the boot drive and the ram, stick by stick. How do I check if the risers are causing the short?

illig

Skeith wrote: »

Same results as before. Tested it with only the boot drive and the ram, stick by stick. How do I check if the risers are causing the short?

Run it outside of the case. Just the mobo, CPU, ram, and psu. Nothing else (like accessories - it will post w/out kbd and mouse, etc)

Have you checked for any kind of beep code or light code that the mobo may be trying to signal? Sometimes people dont hook up the mobo speaker so they can't hear the beep code.

Also, I once had a ram slot go bad. So try booting with one stick of ram in each slot one by one...

CycloneRanger

Skeith wrote: »

Same results as before. Tested it with only the boot drive and the ram, stick by stick. How do I check if the risers are causing the short?

To be clear, you have the CPU installed as well, right? It won't do anything without the CPU.

Skeith

Oh yes, of course, though part of that was laziness; my heatsink is pretty big and remounting it is always ... fun. That's one of the things I did with the ram too, @illig. I'll pop over to the hardware store and grab a couple of small pieces of wood to elevate the motherboard off my desk when they're open.

iRevert

Skeith wrote: »

Oh yes, of course, though part of that was laziness; my heatsink is pretty big and remounting it is always ... fun. That's one of the things I did with the ram too, @illig. I'll pop over to the hardware store and grab a couple of small pieces of wood to elevate the motherboard off my desk when they're open.

you can just use a cardboard box

Skeith

It was the power supply after all. Thanks for the help dudes.