GA-P35DS3L rev 2.0 Boot Issues

[soulreaver]

My computer has been running fine for about a year and a half. Recently I have had problems booting it. Sometimes it will hang at the Gigabyte POST screen, sometimes it will hang during the second stage of POST right before it boots from the hard drive, and sometimes it will power on but not show anything on the monitor while the fans run continuously. Sometimes it boots up fine and works well until I shutdown and reboot again. It seems to boot most of the time if I remove one of the sticks of RAM, however with two sticks of RAM running in dual channel it will not consistently boot to Windows. I've tried all of the RAM slots and tested the RAM thoroughly and it was found to have no errors. I've also tried various BIOS settings and flashed the BIOS to the latest version, neither of which seems to have made a difference. Is there anything else these problems could be related to besides the motherboard? It seems like the board is going bad to me, but I could be missing something.

Hardware:

Model Name : GA-P35-DS3L(rev. 2.0)
M/B Rev : 2.0
BIOS Ver : F9
VGA Brand : EVGA      Model : Geforce 8800GT
CPU Brand : Intel      Model : E6750      Speed : 2.66 GHz
Operation System : Vista 32-bit      SP : 2
Memory Brand : Crucial      Type : DDRII
Memory Size : 2GB      Speed : 800 MHz
Power Supply : 430 W

Thanks!

[oggmonster]

Have you tried clearing the cmos? Are you using memtest to test memory? Try reseating all connections, running system with bare minimum (no front usb, sound, no DVD drive etc) obviously keep operating system HDD in. Also keep whats plugged in to a minimum so keyboard, mouse, monitor + power.
Do you have anyway to test PSU and graphics card?

[Pottypete]

Hi,
Had a simular problem a while ago, cold boot issue, but it turned out to be a graphic card fault,
Also
check Did You load optimized defaults then save and apply and reboot
I believe on all new GA bios's cold booting  was fixed ,
so likely you just did not do the load optimized and save and apply/reboot the last time you flashed.
I know you have the newest bios, but without loading optimized, and then  reset you can get a problem,
Also Check your cmos battery
Just my two penneth!

[soulreaver]

Update: Cleared the CMOS, reseated all connections, disconnected everything but the essentials and did some systematic testing. I managed to narrow the problem down (thankfully!) to one stick of RAM which failed to boot every time on its own. This is surprising because I had previously run both sticks overnight (7 passes) on Memtest and it detected no errors. Anyway, I'm convinced it is the RAM and will RMA it ASAP!

Thanks so much for your help guys, I just needed some encouragement to get down in the trenches and test everything properly.

[oggmonster]

Glad you found the problem, unfortunatly the majority of hardware testing software (memtest, HDD diagnostics etc) are pretty acurate but 99.999*% acurate. So theres a smalll chance that it will pass the test even though its faulty.
Let us know how you get on. Although as DDR2 is so cheap now, you may not want to bother RMA'ing it and just buy some new stuff. If it turns out to not be a RAM issue, you can always ebay it and get the majority of your cash back!