OT: Bios display freezes after mem check

[Andrew]

For about a week now, my PC seems to stop during powerup when showing the bios stuff and Immediately after showing the amount of memory and MEM OK message.

Mostly it just waits, but if I press ESC it immediately shows the disks that it has found and then boots windows as normal.

I have looked through all the available windows error logs that I can find and nothing seems to be amiss.

There was an AMD bios update that arrived as a Windows update and I installed it, but that was months ago. Nothing has been changed recently apart from windows updates.

Any idea ?.

Andrew

[Lee]

When I have encountered similar in the past, it has been either a failing (or corrupt) disc or a usb device. I would suggest running a chkdsk at least and maybe something like crystal disc to check for smart errors.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Only time this happened to me was on an old board when I added a USB webcam. It would hang for about 5 minutes when booting.

It may be configured to look for some hardware that isnt there also. Check bios settings

[John Rumm]

Could be:

USB device causing problem - card readers with compact flash sockets are a favourite - someone stuffs something into the CF slot by mistake and folds some pins over. The card reader then overcurrents the USB on power up.

Failing disk - especially if its a PCI NVMe M2 drive - they can cause all manner of grief when they go bad.

Possibly even a low CMOS battery if its an old machine.

[pamela]

What are the beep codes or voice messages?

[Andrew]

No SSD.

2011 Gigabyte m/b but I changed the cmos battery about 2 years ago.

One 500Gb SATA harddisk and one SATA dvd/read/writer

No card readers and only one USB3 extender that connects to keyboard and rodent. Printer also USB but used infrequently so off most of the time.

Device manager does not show any errors (i.e. none of those exclamation marks in a yellow triangle).

That's it.

I recently bought a new Iiyama 32 inch IPS monitor and plugged that in to test it. PC reported the maximum setting to be 1920*1080 even though it can show 1440*whatever.

Now I am back to using my hazro monitor which is 1920*1200 while the

32 inch Iiyama is connected to my HDFOXT2 stb as a tv, for the time being.

At some point after trying the IIyama monitor, I had to unplug the USB extender and plug it back in to get the keyboard working. No idea why I had to. That was about a month ago.

[Andrew]

One beep as windows prepares to show its logo, which is the way it has been since 2011.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

Remove all usb devices and test it then. Sometimes one malfunctions causing this sort of problem I've found. Often this sort of thing can be fixed with a bios flash of an updated one. It could be a bug which has only recently showed up due to a new ram stick or something. On the other hand, I'm always leery of ram being OK pronouncements. You can have a lazy byte somewhere. I tend to swap the sticks and see if the symptom changes. After that a bit of dodgyness on the hard disc boot record does this, in fact had I realised this was the issue, I might have been able to salvage my ssd main drive before it decided to end it all. Also while inside check all cables as well.

Brian

[Peter Johnson]

Failing power supply?

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

Well, I'd say that is unlikely, unless its very slow to get up to voltage. Might be interesting to put something like Speedfan on the machine and have a look at the voltages etc, but these days psus are pretty reliable. Brian

[Dave Liquorice]

Or failing electrolytic capacitors on the motherboard. How old is the machine?

All but one of the nine 680 uF 4 V electolytics on my 2009 vintage PC failed earlier in the year resulting in it failing to boot, not even any POST beeps. It had been flakey for a while. No other electrolytics had failed or showed signs of failing. £4.78 delivered for replacements, well 680 uF 10 V and a bit of surgery to the CPU heat sink as they were 3 mm taller and it's been fine since.

Does the PC have a speaker attached directly to the motherboard to give the POST beeps? They can be useful for diagnosis.

[Martin Brown]

Might be worth setting the boot from disk again in case it has got itself confused. No other BIOS beeps or error messages?

Saving the BIOS configuration might be worth a try too - although I would expect it to grumble if it thought there was any corruption.

I have seen that behaviour with a bad SD card in a card reader and also with defective or marginal overloaded USB port on a machine. Worth unplugging all peripherals and seeing if it alters the behaviour.

If it is that then there is a good chance that after 5 minutes operation once the PC is warm internally the marginal CMOS battery voltage will have risen sufficiently to reboot cleanly. I had a portable with that fault once and it refused to boot from cold but would boot the second or third time around the loop once things were warmed up.

[NY]

I've been bombarded by too much Brexit and General Election. I read this thread title as "Boris freezes after mem check" :-)

[whisky-dave]

Me too at first glance, sounded like good news for once.

[Ray]

Never seen that produce that ESC to continue booting effect.

And that's the difference. You cant ignore his booting fine and then stalling until an ESC and then being fine once its completed booting. That's the crucial symptom detail that cant be ignored when working out what is causing the problem.

And his wasn't.

Yes, he said it give just the one usual beep.

[Andrew]

I have tried a restart when warm and the same issue occurs.

I have now realised that pressing any key after the display has stopped (after showing "XXXXX mem etc MEM OK", and beeping once), and almost immediately it shows the attached disks and proceeds with normal boot.

Another single beep occurs once the windows logo appear, just before the username password prompt appears.

I have been into the BIOS settings and changed "Stop on all errors, except keyboard" to "stop on all errors". This makes no difference.

All the voltages are shown as correct. It's an 8-YO M/B+ sata disk. Maybe I'll start choosing a replacement. Today should be 'good day' if you get a genuine bargain (*if*).

I'm reluctant to do anything drastic until the election dust has settled, in case I end up without a PC at all.