Black Screen waking from sleep mode

I recently built an HTPC and it was working OK until last night. I’ve been using it mainly as an OTA DVR and it does wake up, record, etc.

I went to program a recording & it was already awake & the HDD indicator LED was on. However the HDTV had a black screen with a message to select boot device & press any key. This was not a BSOD but a black screen. There was no way to select anything as every time I pressed a key the same message displayed another time. I finally powered off.

Another program was scheduled to record at this time but it should not have. It was a series schedule set for new but this episode was not. That’s one strike against the EPG. Anyway it started recording after I booted back up but it was missing the first 40 minutes because I booted up 40 minutes into the program.

I don’t think the program was the problem but maybe there was a glitch at the start of the recording which caused the problem, I don’t know. Unfortunately I have no idea how long the HTPC had been sitting in the “select boot” state. It could have been that way for hours.

I looked at the PC’s event logs to see if anything was obvious. But there were so many logs I had no idea what I was looking at.

Any ideas what would cause a PC to display the message or where to look? Could this be a motherboard or RAM problem?

I know there is a BIOS setting to restart the PC after a power failure & the power is restored & I never enabled that. Is that the one you are talking about or is there another one for software crashes that I should be looking for?

The black screen was not the usual black screen I see when I want to enter BIOS. It was just 2 lines of text, and kept repeating every time I hit a key. I did try the delete key but never tried a function key so who know what that would have done.

I’m using this PC as a DVR. If there is a power failure I really want it to boot up again. I also recently had Windows Media Center set to automatically start when Windows started. But after the problem I turned that back off.

I did look where you mentioned & “Automatically restart” was checked.

I also noticed “Write an event to the system log” was checked. I looked in the event logs and was completely lost. There were hundreds of events & nothing seemed obvious to me. Where in the event logs would I look to find out what happened?

I've looked through the event logs several times but nothing wrong is obvious. Some of the Windows diagnostic logs state some driver(s) was slow to wake up or respond, or words to that effect. However I have no idea if that crashed the system.

Thanks for the link. I'll re-read it and look at the event logs again.