I have recently developed a boot problem with my Abit KV7 motherboard. The system worked fine for 4 months without problems. What happens is from a cold boot the system gives the single beep that POST has completed correctly and the BIOS splash screen is present and then the system re-boots. This cycle may happen 2 or 3 times and afterwards the boot up reaches the Windows XP splash screen and just as the “Welcome” screen appears it re-boots again. The next time it boots into Windows XP and everything is fine. Once it is up and running there are no other problems. From a cold boot it may boot directly to the Windows XP “Welcome” screen and then re-boot. On a warm boot it boots correctly each time. The problem appears to be temperature related, if the system is warm no problems.
The system I have is an Athlon 3200XP (BIOS shows 3200 at 400 MHz FSB) with 512Mb DDR 2700 RAM (BIOS splash screen shows DDR 333 MHz) and a Nvidia MX 440 Video Card. The Power Supply is a 350-Watt cheapie. The rest of the system is academic, because I have changed HDDs, used SATA and IDE types, Video Cards, even a PCI video card, or disconnected all non-essential hardware. Installing Windows XP is OK in this faulty boot-up condition.
I tried adjusting the BIOS to indicate a slower CPU but this either produced the same boot problem or when selecting XP 3000+ with 333Mhz FSB it would not boot and hung up in POST. This required clearing the BIOS.
The BIOS has been upgraded to the latest version.
The Power Supply appears to be the problem (the 3.3 Volt supply is rated at 20 Amps) but if this supply was inadequate I would imagine it would not boot at all and remembering it worked OK for 4 months. Are there any clues from the failure points, just after POST or just after the Windows XP splash screen is reached? Are the peak current demands at this point greater than other times? Any comments on resolving this issue is appreciated.
