When this problem occurs the computer lights up, hard drives come to speed etc but no beep, no video etc totally dead, if it gets to the beep it is ok, what part of the boot sequence I'm not sure, happens about once a week or so, the HDD's are SATA, only the DVD drive is IDE.:hmmm:

Hmmm
 

I assume the puter is not over clocked, right?

Reset the Cmos (check the pfd manual for instructions or remove the battery from the mother board for a minute or so and try again.

If it fails then when the puter acts up do not turn it off, remove the cover and do a wiggle test (shake gently all of the cables) ad see if there is a beep or the puter tries to reboot by itself again.

Mine has 2 Sata and 2 IDE, 4 HD 250GB each. Could not trash them that easily.

:D

Well you could do the hard test.

Boot the MB with only the keyboard, mem and video card hooked up and add each component one at a time until you can repeat the problem. It will give you 'no OS found' error, but the MB should still boot the Bios.

If its random that will be real hard to put your finger on. Case in point, I had an ASUS board that did the same thing. One day I swapped out a HD and found I had bent one of the SATA drive pins and the drive still worked. After fixing that no more problems. It did the same thing, no beep just hang there until I cycled the power.

I have it over clocked but problem is there even with bios defaults, the annoying thing is that it only happens every so often, I suppose that is better if I can't find the fault.:oops: Will continue to hold the reset down, if it happens again I will try moving things around, might even try a pci diagnostic card, they are around $15 on ebay.:yep:

Dude that really sounds like a power supply issue.

Very possible, will have to try a few things before the problem is resolved I'd say, if at all.:-?

Some time ago I experienced precisely the same kind of problems: When starting up it would most of the time just give a black screen with all the lights lighting up. It would POST succesfully after anything between five to ten attempts, or not at all. If I restarted after reaching Windows there were no problems. If I shut it down and then tried to start there would be the same problem again.

The culprit to all this turned out to be a faulty mem module, which would sometimes stop the booting at mem check. I diagnosed it by removing the mem modules one at a time until things worked out, then threw them away and bought new ones. What helped here was a set of lights behind the case that flash in different patterns if there's an error during booting. They would "lock" at memcheck, which pointed me to that direction. No problems anymore :yeah:

The key here is your failing POST. POST (Power On Self Test) inventories and verifies specific things. If your getting NO post beep, then its one of 2 things - power, or memory.

I lean toward memory at the moment, given what has been stated above.
Pull the memory totally out of the board and try and recreate. If you get no memory found beeps, then readd it. It could be something as simple as your sticks not being seated firmly, or one starting to die on you.

Fincuan is probably right, because post will inventory the memory available and it may be hanging. As of now, thats where my money would be.

Thanks, will try that, have 2x2gig sticks.:yep: