When you go to turn my PC on it will power up, POST and then power down again almost immediately. In past experience, I would've said a power problem, or heat, or a short or some such thing. However, I've discovered that entering the BIOS and leaving it there for a couple of minutes before exiting, yields a perfectly good boot into Windows.

Any ideas as to the issue?

I would think that the boot.ini file might be corrupted and is resolved by going into the bios which then skips the offending section of the ini file.


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Once you are in Windows, if you restart or hard-reset without turning the machine off will it boot up OK again?

If so, possibly a flat BIOS battery? Sometimes going into the BIOS menu will load safe defaults which enable booting.

It's also worth checking the hard disk for errors and checking the SMART statistics. It might be taking too long to spin up properly.

Thanks guys. Yeah, a hard reset without power off is no issue. There's an SSD and 4 physical disks to spin up on boot and I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of them had some kind of issue. I'm a little nervous to rock the boat though, as I have 7TB of data that I don't particular want to lose and no feasible way of backing up whilst I'm in Italy.

How long do BIOS batteries last? The motherboard is only just over a year old...

Should last 7 years. Is the clock right?

It won't hurt to check the SMARTs.

Clock's bang on, and she's not connected to the internet.

SMARTs would be a CHKDSK thing or using a HDD utility? What happens if I find something?

http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm

Not used it, but I've heard other people say its OK.

If it's actually failing then urgently copy important files wherever you can, then pull the cables out.

If it's just slow starting, there may be a BIOS setting to allow a few extra seconds on startup.

It could be the hard drive is lagging when starting up, you used to be able to alter the delay, so that the drives had more time to spin up.

Alternatively, it could be that the boot sector is not being read correctly when the drive is cold, but once it has warmed up and the drive has expanded a bit, it is reading correctly.

My first stop would be to run SpinRite over the disk.

This was my first thought too - Older machines BIOS had a user-defined HDD delay option.

Is the machine running at stock speeds? Poorly applied overclocks can display similar symptoms.

Bone stock. Recent hardware, Z77 mobo and bogo Pentium with stock cooler.

I'll try to figure the HDDs out then. Need to set aside a little while presumably? I don't often get chunks of time in this place unless it's my day off.

I see a pattern emerging...

It should only take you a few minutes to look in the BIOS and try to find an option to wait for the disks to spin up, so I'd do that next time you turn it on. You'll be going into it anyway by the sounds of things!

Presuming there never used to be a problem, if one of the disks is taking longer to spin up then that does rather warn of impending doom.

If you don't find an option (I've not noticed it recently) then your fastest bet is to just try booting without all the drives connected. Use a process of elimination; start with just the boot disk and add the others one at a time.