Re: hardware troubleshooting

If any of the capacitors on your motherboard or video card have swollen,
leaked or burst, that's the problem.
Otherwise it's failing when the operating system attempts to initialise
a hardware device that isn't used during memtest. It could be the video
card, sound card, network, or anything else. Testing the PSU (or using a
different PSU) is always a good troubleshooting step for unusual
problems. Just for fun, try booting windows in safe mode to prevent it
from loading all its hardware drivers.


On 24/08/2010 1:20 PM, Martin Visser wrote:
> If it is that old, it could be the system powersupply. If the CPU
> doesn't get power at the right voltage, the fail-protect circuitry will
> reset the CPU. (You never want a CPU or memory to run at below the
> designed supply voltage, as the likely failure mode then is corrupt
> memory or registers (1's get read as 0's), hence the protection mechanism.
> 
> You can measure this with a multimeter. (You should expect to see +/-5V,
> +/-12V and 3.3V where appropriate.
> 
> The other thing is remove all of the non-essential peripherals (CD other
> HDs, FANs) temporarily and see whether it stays up longer. 
> 
> New power supplies can be bought for around $30 from your local PC parts
> shop and is possibly worth even trying a swap out. 
> 
> Regards, Martin
> 
> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
> 
> 
> On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Voytek Eymont <[email protected]
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> 
>     I have an older PC (vintage ?), P3 667Mhz, 768MB, 2940UWP SCSI
> 
>     it was my old desktop, and, it always worked 24x7
> 
>     I suddenly developed a reboot loop: it start re-booting, then rebooting
>     once the system starts loading.
> 
>     as it has three 256 SIMMs, I've tried one by one with just one of the
>     three SIMMs installed, regadrless on which single SIMM is installed,
>     same
>     reboot loop
> 
>     I've run Memtest 4.1 on a single SIMM, after 20+ hours and about 20
>     passess, no errors
> 
>     if I try to boot Knoppix from IDE CD, it boot to the first screen,
>     when I
>     hit enter to load Knoppix, shortly after it starts loading, it reboots
> 
>     clearly it's not worth fixing a P3, but, I'm curious what's failed in
>     this, any clues ?
> 
>     - SCSI HD boot (3 different boot partitions) reboot;
>     - IDE CD Knoppix boot, reboot;
>     - IDE CD MemText86 tests RAM OK
> 
> 
> 
>     --
>     Voytek
> 
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> 
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