PC shuts down immediately after POST

Hello all,

My homebuilt PC, which has worked fine for a couple of years, suddenly
isn't working after I cleaned out the pounds of dust from inside it.

During POST process, the BIOS/RAID controller seems to identify the
hard drives properly (I'm running two pairs of RAID-1 mirrored SATA
drives) ...and I think it's not the drives anyway because of the last
bullet-point below.

System goes through the BIOS part of the startup without problems but
then either shuts down or reboots almost immediately:

* If I try to boot into windows, it shuts down after a couple seconds
of the "blinking light" moving from left to right on the first Windows
screen.

* If I try to boot into safe mode, it shows a long list of drivers on
the screen, the last of which I believe is mup.sys, and then says at
the bottom center, "press ESC to cancel loading VAX347B.sys", and then
crashes. I doubt that VAX347B is the problem, however, because of the
following:

* If I disconnect all hard drives from the system and boot from a
Windows XP CD, it shuts down or reboots when screen says "Windows is
inspecting your hardware configuration."

During the cleaning process, I removed the CPU fan, cleaned it and
replaced it. Someone suggested to me that if it weren't back on
exactly right, that could cause the problem so I took it off again and
put it back on and the computer then worked...for two days...after
which all the symptoms returned. I don't believe it's overheating
because the crash will happen 15 seconds after starting a cold
computer (though I suppose that doesn't mean the computer couldn't
think it's a heat issue.)

When I was restarting the PC after the original cleaning, I thought I
heard my UPS make an odd noise as if turning on the PC caused a sudden
(bad) power draw...and I thought I smelled something burning. It was
very faint. I moved around some cables and tried again and that issue
went away, but that certainly could have caused a problem...I just
don't know what problem.

When I boot into BIOS setup, the computer will run without stopping.
When I go into the BIOS monitor sections for voltage and for
temperature, all readings seem to stay within very narrow and normal
ranges.

Any thoughts on this would be GREATLY appreciated!

Please respond to group and, if you can, to me directly at rossputin
(at) gmail.com

wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> My homebuilt PC, which has worked fine for a couple of years, suddenly
> isn't working after I cleaned out the pounds of dust from inside it.

Have you 'shorted the CMOS' to reset the BIOS settings yet ? And then you
must re-enter them of course .You may need to do that.

Graham

On Fri, 14 Dec 2007 05:54:18 -0800, rossputin wrote:

> When I boot into BIOS setup, the computer will run without stopping.
> When I go into the BIOS monitor sections for voltage and for
> temperature, all readings seem to stay within very narrow and normal
> ranges.
>
> Any thoughts on this would be GREATLY appreciated!

Well, it's making it past post. Otherwise it wouldn't start loading the
OS. 1st thing I'd do is try and boot something else like a dos floppy to
get a better idea of what's happening. I'd also try and boot a memtest cd
or floppy and check the ram. If that works, try a live cd like Knoppix or
any of the many free ones. And a good visual inspection of the MB is in
order fro bulging leaking caps, burned components, etc. Could also still
be the PSU. I always have a spare since it seems to be the failure a lot
of the time. Try replacing it. Might even try that after trying the other
OS/test boots. Good luck.

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