System won't Reboot

[evilphantom]

Hello All,
I built my system a little over a year ago and everything was working fine up until about three months ago. All of a sudden my system rebooted randomly and its never been the same since. Now when I go into Windows and install something then reboot the system hangs on startup, specifically on the splash screen with the progress bar. I re installed windows but the problem is still there. Then I installed Ubuntu and the problem exists with it too.
By this point I figured it was a hardware problem so I replaced the HDD and it still does it.

The only way I can boot is to power down the system then power it on and the system starts up with no problem.

Has anyone experienced this or something similar?
I am running the following:

Motherboard: A8N-SLI
CPU: AMD X2 4200+
Mem: 1 GB Dual Channel Crucial Memory
HDD1: Seagate 250 SATA
HDD2: Seagate 320 SATA
Video: XFX nvidia 6800

Your help is appreciated. Its quite annoying.

Dez

 

[Tuxedopenguin]

This sounds like a memory management issue, my instincts tell me that your MCH is faulty.
To confirm this, download and install the latest drivers for it.
If you have a VIA chipset the you would go to viarena.com and download from there.

Do this and provide us with feedback

regards

 

[wahnula]

Random reboots can also be heat or PSU related. When booted, your MB waits for a "Power good" signal from the PSU, if that fails then it will reboot.

I have also seen poorly-seated Heatsink/Fans cause this problem, they get hot quick and reboot. Check your CPU temp in BIOS after next reboot.

Was there anything that happened immediately before the problem? Any new programs or hardware?

Tony

 

[evilphantom]

Thank you for your quick response.

wahnula - I checked the PSU already [forgot to mention it above] as well as the CPU temp etc. No such luck with those.

Tuxedopenguin - I didn't update the nforce drivers to the latest so I tried that but no luck.

After reading your post you sparked some thought. I decided to check the dual channel memory i have [its OCZ not crucial as I first reported] I decided to re-seat the memory. But I remembered something I did after the initial reboot happened. While troubleshooting I thought the memory might be at fault so I re-seated the memory back then, I must have in inadvertently swapped which channel was had which stick of RAM. This time after re-seating the memory I swapped locations and viola it started working again.

I don't know if this because the Dual-Channel Memory requires each stick to be in a specific location or if the second stick has a fault in it [First time using dual channel mem]. I am going to be running some tests to check if the memory is faulty. If I find anything interesting I'll post it so to help someone else.

Thanks again for all your help!