I foolishly offered to build a computer for a family friend, and it's not going so well. I got him a Shuttle SN27P2, Athlon 5000+, 2GB of Corsair RAM, ATI X1650XT graphics card, and Western Digital drive (among other stuff, but I figured that was all that's pertinent). After putting it all together, I have two problems:

Infrequent bootup success rate

This is a little troubling. I press the power button, fans start whirring, the LEDs on the front are lighting up fine, the hard drives seem to be spinning, the video card fan is spinning, everything looks right...but no video. The monitor shows that it's not getting a signal. I also get the sense that it's not merely a video problem, but that the machine isn't even getting to the POST. Every time, I'm able to press the power button to turn it off. But every 4th-6th try (or so), I'll get the POST, the machine will boot up, and run normally until the next reboot when I go through it all over again. Could the problem just be that I have an old CRT hooked up via DVI-VGA adapter?

Windows only "half-installs"

This one is tough to explain. I've now installed an official, licensed (though OEM) copy of XP Pro on this machine three times, and each time has been exactly the same. I get to the graphical installation screen, past the "regions and dialects" part, and suddenly the install asks for the Windows SP2 disks. WTF? SP2 is supposed to be included in the one disc (it says so on the disc its self). But still, it asks for me to point it to the location of the disc. I keep trying to point it in the right direction, but it refuses to do anything. It gives me a browse option, but it can't seem to see any files/folders in any drive it points me to (and the icons for all the drives are blank - just a white space). So I cancel it, as well as a couple more dialogs asking for the same thing. Then, when I finally get into the "installed" Windows, I have a flawed installation. Tons of stuff is missing, networking isn't installed, and the OS keeps giving me errors if I try to install any other stuff from the XP CD (like, oh, networking!).

Can anyone help? I'm sort of freaking out here. I don't want to screw this machine up and have to send stuff back.


ps-I'm a little disappointed in Shuttle - this system was not very easy to get stuff into. The power/data cables for the hard drives have to be contorted in the worst way. The video card needs to be wrestled into place juuust so. Worst of all, there was a screw for the expansion slot machanism on the back that was so tightened on (by a machine, I assume), even though I applied a great amount of pressure, I completely stripped the head. I had to use quite a bit of strength and needlenose pliers to get it out. I hope nobody nearby heard the cursing this machine has brought forth from me...

When I've seen something like this it's been bad memory.

What blitz said. Check the memory first with memtest86 or something. With this kind of problem, I'd probably go through the following list:

• Check the memory
  
• Clear the CMOS data and go through the BIOS settings
  
• Check for a BIOS update from Shuttle
  
• Swap the IDE cable to your CDROM drive with one you know is good (I have had a number of Shuttles with iffy cables).
  
• Try another CDROM drive

There are a few more things to try, but the probability of fixing it is diminishing after the above list. Let us know how you get on.

Thanks for the help. I'll try those when I get home tonight.

Oh, and can I just say that I absolutely hate thermal paste? That is the most horrible stuff in history. First, I'm never sure how much to put on, second, it's impossible to spread around (which is much harder now that the dye takes up the whole chip), and if you get any on your skin it takes Lava soap to get off. Argh!

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I put the right amount on, but every failure with this rig makes me wonder. Could that cause this?

No, badly applied paste has very different symptoms. If you put too much paste then you will be looking at a heat problem. This would not show up by not POSTing or stop your PC from turning on. It would also not stop your Windows installation failing. It would instead cause crashing, hanging and possibly erratic behavior (spontaneous rebooting etc). Modern CPUs clock themselves down drastically when they detect rising temperatures so they can feel sluggish.

You can check for sure by using any number of benchmarks or soak testing tools.

Oh yeah, I'd also try a different Windows Installation CD. Have you used the one you have now before? It could be messed up.

A generic copy of XP just may work better. I had a problem installing XP when I used a dell disk in a compaq computer. While a had a valid license for the compaq the system wouldn't except it. I had to telephone in to get it activated. It did not stop the disc from loading it just told me that the key was invalid.

Memory sounds like a good place to start. What are you running for clock speeds? Overclocking?

Oh I'm definitely not overclocking.

Now that I'm home, I wanted to post one more symptom that didn't strike me until just now. When the machine fails to display video, the fan on the video card is going at max speed, non-stop. The occasional times I get it to boot, it doesn't do that at all.

Now I'll try the suggestions...

Too much paste can sometimes create subtle signal shorts, usually resulting in the machine not booting at all. The correct amount is as little as you can possibly apply to barely and uniformly cover the entire contact areas of both pieces (CPU and heatsink mating surfaces).

Cheers

Do you have a different graphics card to try?

It's almost certainly memory related. That doesn't necessarily mean the memory is faulty. I have built a lot of shuttles over the last few years, and quite frequently I have seen similar results which were resolved by using different memory, while the stick taken from the apparently faulty shuttle worked fine in another machine. Shuttle motherboards seem to be particularly picky about which ram will work correctly with them. Switching to Crucial (micron) ram fixed the problem.

Memory faults or errors can give very odd diagnostics in some machines. A friend's company was having major problems with installing 2000 on a whole series of identical machines, where it was giving hard drive and/or CD read errors. The symptoms were similar to the ones you're reporting. It turned out that by swapping the ram sticks around between the machines you could fix the faulty hard drive The timings on the memory/motherboard combination were just too close to the edge to be reliable.

pca

Besides the memory, you might look at the processor pins (or socket pins). Once I had a pin bent over and it would fail randomly just like memory.

Darnit, I thought I checked for compatability on all the components. Crap. I've gone to Crucial's website, and they only recommend one product for the SN27P, and it isn't the one I got. I've gone to Crucial now (I should have gone there in the first place), and found the one I need. I hate the thought of sending back the old memory and ordering new sticks. Argh.

Your original post said it best... "I foolishly...".

As the saying goes "No good deed goes unpunished".

If you ever remove old tile, you can still see the trowel marks. To my mind, that has to be because they still existed under the surface of the tile. And thinset mortar is a lot, well, thinner than thermal paste is. I imagine if you did that, you'd have about 25% of the core untouched by a thermal conductor.

I have new memory in the system. I have replaced the thermal paste on the CPU. I have reinstalled Windows. I have updated the BIOS for the Shuttle motherboard.

I'm still having problems getting the thing to boot reliably.

Now at least I have zero problem loading Windows onto the machine, but I can't give this machine to its future owner and say "don't worry, just turn it on and off until it starts up, then you're good to go. Just try not to turn it off and you'll be fine!"

Any more ideas guys? I really appreciate the help so far. It was killing me all weekend because I ordered the new memory for overnight mail on Thursday, but I guess it was a little too late in the day so it got here Monday. Then I pop in the RAM and find it didn't solve the problem (though I think that was another problem that needed fixing anyway).

It has a PCI slot, so take out your new graphics card and pop in the prehistoric PCI one you have lying around and see whether that works.

Have you considered that you might just happen to have a faulty motherboard/cpu?

See if you can start swapping out components with what you might have laying around... CPU, video card. I feel for you on the motherboard.

I had an AOpen motherboard here that I got for a buddy, and after a couple of months it started behaving poorly, in a very similar fashion to yours.

We eventually swapped out the PCIe video card for a PCI one, and it suddenly was healthy again. So we RMAd the video card, eventually got a replacment, and.. same problem. So this time around we RMAd the motherboard, and the identical replacement has been working fine for the past year and a half.

Cheers

Well crap. I called Shuttle (long distance - no toll free number) and they concluded after no troubleshooting that I would need to RMA the system. He estimated that it would take two weeks. This is NOT good. Personally, I will go through the hassle of sending the system back and everything, but this is not my computer. I'm building this for someone. Now because of a defective product I'm going to have to tell that person that I can't get their system to them for another two to three weeks?

This whole system has been a disaster. I want to stress the fact that, when it comes to the practical aspects of the design, this is the worst designed Shuttle case I've ever used. The memory slots practically take a hammer to get the chips in. The power and data connectors for the SATA hard drives make you think you're going to twist the connections on the hard drives to the breaking point. The screws holding the expansion slot cover on the back were so machine tightened that I needed pliers to loosen them.

And now the damn thing is broken. Fantastic.

Sorry, I had to rant.

I just thought I'd update the thread. Lets see:

- replaced RAM, problem continued
- replaced Shuttle system, problem continued
- replaced video card, problem...solved!

Damn ATI card was causing all the problems. I don't know why, either. Perhaps the Shuttle system didn't care for a card that didn't have that 6-pin power connector? All I know is that this card didn't work, but this card does. I've never gone with nVidia for some reason, probably because I liked getting cards made by ATI themselves instead of BFG or MSI or XFX, etc. But this card is impressing me. At the very least, the Windows drivers aren't the horrid mess that ATI's are.

So that's it. That was the problem. A bad video card.