Takes 2-4 times power on / off before booting (2 beeps) Mystery

Slartybart,

Let me apologize for my vagueness. I know you are trying to help me, and the more random / fiddling I do, there's a good chance I'm complicating things further. I'm so desperate for this system to work, I have been logging too many hours and have not been able to always remain intelligent and objective.

Your clarity and support is very much appreciated, and I will try my best to seek help in a more effective manor going forward.

The current install is running, so hopefully things will be A OK.. Fingers crossed.

M14

Patience is a virtue! Slow & methodical often does so much more than fast and energetic, but it's hard under pressure to remember that after 5 hours of troubleshooting.

So, getting around that boot error was a matter of

1. disconnecting the drives and ram.
2. turning on pc, then turning off pc
3. connecting ram, turning on pc, and having now access to bios.
4. changing hard drive setting to ata from achi

Then I was able to boot to my W7 Usb.
I installed W7 in the ata setting, then reinstalled the bios (went with newest version, which seemed same as old A08), then rebooted, changed ata to achi in bios, then rebooted and installed W7 again.

All seemed OK.

However, as I write this, I've just rebooted the second system, and it's doing the same thing again

I'm now wondering if it's a video card issue, as soon before the problems started, I started using a program that decompresses video on the GPU rather than CPU, so it might have gotten it's first hard usage in years.

In any case, back to the drawing board, and thanks again.

M14

Yeah, so after over 20 hours of trouble shooting and pulling my hair out, I have finally come to the conclusion that it is 99% the video card.

I don't know how / why I didn't test this earlier, but after my new install (with the old, simpler card), I went to put back in my Nvidia Quadro 3700, and it started doing the exact same thing.

Swapped back my consumer card, and it boots every time consistently.

So all that powering on / off, caused the hard drive trouble that made me reformat, but had I just originally tried the other video card, I would have avoided all those hours (most likely) and all the costs.

Not that I think about it, it really makes sense as a software I started using around the same time "does all the playback on the videocard's GPU it's faster than any other codec"..

My old card just probably couldn't keep up, and kicked the bucket. Anyway, again, 1000 thanks for all the support.

M14

Thanks so much! Weeks, YIKES!!

Now to track down a new video card :)

Oh Maaaaaan. So this is the thread that never ends. I figured I'd try and match your 'weeks of troubleshooting' : )

So, all was going well. I specifically would shut down the machine, and restart to see if there were any hiccups. It would restart every time, flawlessly. I did this about 3 or 4 times.

After that, I did two things.

1. I plugged in an ethernet cable (to connect to start downloading drivers etc, although I didn't start installing).

2. I then went into the bios, and made usb later than the sata drive, so that I would not always boot into the windows install any time the usb was left plugged in on a reboot.

Low and behold, on the next reboot, I am cycling through problems again.

All I can get is a constant alternation between these two screens (see pictures attached).

Lol What's so strange to me is things work, then don't work. Work, then don't work.

I guess I will start trying your ram suggestion next, one at a time.

Any other thoughts of what might be causing this? There is no beeping now, so maybe that was the bad video card, but what is making it cycle like this is beyond me.

M14

Gentlemen,

eventually got everything running, and it is indeed the video card.

A happy ending for me, as better the video card then the mother board.

Thanks again for all help.

M14