PC constantly on a restart loop almost immediately after turning on.

JustAnotherSaver

It's ok now (i think), but I'd like to know why it was likely to have done it as that's never happened before.

I could've sworn that when i went to bed last night i turned my PC off, but perhaps I didn't as when i woke my PC was on. So i turned it off.

Came a few hours later to turn it on & it just kept looping. I'd get the initial wording at the start, the stage before you can even hit to go in to BIOS i think - the very first text where it'd say "Initializing USB Controllers....."

But then instead of loading the controllers, whatever they are, it'd just restart & do it again & again & again.

Eventually it displayed that only 5 cores were activated instead of the usual 6.

I kept trying to power it off at the power button instead of at the mains switch but that wouldn't work. I'd give it a long press, it'd 'turn off' but as i let go it'd turn on again.

Eventually it snapped out of this loop, seemingly of its own accord & everything 'seems' normal.

But it obviously did it for a reason....?

bingo_bango

Any 'beeps' while it was trying to start?

I'd lean towards a hardware failure if it wasn't getting through the POST sequence, but hard to tell without any reference.

Have you checked that all cores are functioning correctly now? Might be worth installing something like Sandra to check all of the components individually. Make sure you choose the lite version, it's free.

dekaspace

Could be dust and/or overheating components inside and so it either works when its been off for a while, or it could be something has become loose inside so isn't making a good connection.

JustAnotherSaver

I'd struggle to think it's the loose issue since the computer hasn't been knocked or anything.

If dust can do that then maybe since i have no choice but to have the computer on the (carpeted) floor.I have raised it up slightly on little castor things & i blow it out occasionally. It hasn't collected years & years worth of dust but it does get dustier than when i had it at my mothers as it'd be on top of my desk back then.

The only beep it was doing was as it'd restart & it'd be a single beep.

I haven't restarted it yet. I have a lot of videos i'm having to convert from .avi format to .mp4 which is a job i'd been putting off & once that is done then i will make a backup of the hard drive & then i'll try restarting it, just in case it doesn't come back from the restart.

dekaspace

Sometimes it can be as little as a component not installed correctly even years ago that even the tiniest bit of movement such as when turning on a pc moves it the tiniest bit.

Single beep sounds like pc is ok, when that happened to me it was normally either the dvd or hard drive cables needed taken out and put back in, or the cables at back removed but give that a try first since it says usb, power it on with nothing connected not even keyboard just power, if it works then you know its some connected wire then either do it the slow way and try each device one by one connected to back ports.

Then you can find out if theres a problem external device.

Things can get dustier than you think, I clean my every so often (not as much as when I had a easier case to get into) and even I get a lot of dust.

Worse case scenario is to remove each thing like ram and any wireless cards and try pc without them to see if one failed and put them back in one by one.

About the ram, to potentially shorten the time to see if its that, if you have more than 1 stick, and since you say it turns on now does it get far enough to show how much ram is available (as lets say you have 4GB of ram and it shows only 2 you know somethings wrong)

esuhl

Total stab in the dark here, but could it be that the CR2032 battery is flat, causing corruption to the CMOS values, thus preventing a successful boot, and causing the values to be reset to their default/factory settings.

Maybe, the corruption occurs on every boot until eventually the battery is trickle charged enough to be able to able to store the default values, which are eventually read successfully...

Probably not (as I've never seen a PC do this), but it should be easy to just try another battery to see if it helps.

Kendall80

esuhl wrote: »

Total stab in the dark here, but could it be that the CR2032 battery is flat, causing corruption to the CMOS values, thus preventing a successful boot, and causing the values to be reset to their default/factory settings.

Maybe, the corruption occurs on every boot until eventually the battery is trickle charged enough to be able to able to store the default values, which are eventually read successfully...

Probably not (as I've never seen a PC do this), but it should be easy to just try another battery to see if it helps.

This happened to me a few years back initially resulting in the clock reading January 1 1901. Then I also had the recurring restarts as mentioned by the OP. I replaced the entire mainboard as I had a spare, unfortunately a few weeks later the PSU failed too.

JustAnotherSaver

Well thankfully since it happened, i backed everything up & then restarted it. It has been used daily since & it has been fine.

At least i now have a recent backup. I really shouldn't slack on that so i got away with it really.