computer freezing on post screen

[Jeany7]

Hi

Hope you can help – I’m just about ready to throw the thing out of the window.

I built this computer 4 years ago and have had no problems, until last week when it started freezing on the post screen (the one that usually flashes on before Windows starts to load).

I have tried quite a few things including

Changing the cables
Replacing the CMOS battery
Removing and cleaning the ram and placing in different slots
Disconnecting everything but the hard drive, video card and ram
Changing the 80g hard drive for a new 160g hard drive

It will not even boot up using the Installation disc.

I also inserted the installation disc when the hard drive was disconnected – and it started loading the files.

I was about to buy a new mobo when I tried an old 6g hard drive and it booted OK. I then tried an old 10g hard drive and that booted fine.

I thought that maybe the 80g hard drive was faulty, so I deleted the partition, recreated a new partition, and reformatted it using an external caddy on my laptop, and that worked fine – it didn’t report any problems. But still froze on post when inserted back into the desktop.

Has anyone any ideas- Could something have corrupted in the BIOS to cause such a problem.

Jeany
AMD athlon XP 2700 333FSB processor
Asus A7V8X-X motherboard

[matrix_3]

I think it is a Motherboard problem

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[dickersonka]

Did you just reinstall windows or format completely?

If the mbr is messed up that could cause it as well.

When you are formatting, go ahead and do a 'fdisk /mbr'. And do a complete format, not a quick one.