kendr01

After deciding the motherboard was fine I swapped it out into a different tfx sff case with a bigger psu so that i could fit a discrete gpu and have had no issues with it what so ever. I moved the pegatron board that was in my old case into the esprimo case, this board has always been pretty reliable but since fitting it into the fujitsu case I have started having an issue booting reliably so you may be right about my theory being off track. When starting from a cold boot the pc boots fine but if I hit restart from windows the boot device order changes, the hdd still shows as being detected during post though with the quiet boot option off, I keep having to go back into bios and reset the boot order during restarts. This pegatron will automatically try to emulate usb devices as hdd or fdd based on size (below 530mb ffd above hdd) but even my empty usb multi flash card reader is given priority over the hdd, my guess is that you are right about the psu being an issue and somehow during a restart the hdd is not initialising/ powering up properly leaving me stuck on the boot device search screen (black with blinking cursor). Unlike the fujitsu board I do not have the option to exclude specific devices from the boot order, they are redetected at every boot but somehow the hdd is just losing it's priority during restarts, this may well be an issue with the psu not powering the drives properly. The thing that threw me with this pc from the start was the fact that the psu, heatsink and motherboard looked brand new, no dust whatsoever on/in any of them, if it wasn't for the odd ram sticks and a few scratches to the case and the coa being missing I would have guessed it was new old stock, but now I am starting to think it had suffered a booting issue from new and had been scavenged for parts. Either way I can't complain for £35 I have a decent ddr3 motherboard, an e5800 cpu and 250gb Seagate hdd to play with, If I can find a way to fit a standard tfx psu into the fujistu case I might keep that one too if not I will just buy another case for the pegatron board.

I have just bought one of these from an it recycling firm on ebay, The seller claimed it was just spinning fans and nothing else would happen. The guy said it was untested beyond trying to power it up to find it had the issue described here, but it was obvious someone had been in this pc as the optical drive was missing and it has two odd 1gb rams (one samsung one crucial/micron) and had screws rolling loose inside the case So I decided to double check everything. after ensuring all the loose screws had been found (one under motheboard) I cleared the cmos by removing the battery and holding the power button for a minute or two with the mains lead out and fitted a 4gb set of kingston hyperx ram i had hanging around and a copper based cpu cooler that i intended to fit anyway so i swapped them over. I did notice that the standard thermal paste has not held up well (not covering well and had squeeze out) so I would recommend changing that for anyone with one of these. I think the biggest issue may be a bios setting on the motherboard that governs start up and clearing cmos is all it would have taken to get this pc to boot, in the bios options you will find a setting that lets you choose either motherboard controlled startup or acpi. It is my theory that the motherboard controlled start up is keeping some data in ram/cmos settings that is unreliable, which is why reseating ram or completely removing the psu seems to fix it (for a while), With the setting at acpi the unit I have is now bootng up fine even with a rev 03 psu. If you have the problem in the future please before trying differnt hardware and power supllies try clearing the cmos (removing mains lead and cmos battery then holding down the power button will also clear ram) and see if the pc boots up properly, if it does then change that bios setting and let us know if you have the issue again. I know this is my first post and all but does anyone else struggle with the quick reply box (edit box dos it too)? i was trying to type this post out for ages but it kept dropping letters so i had to type really slow and the box kept flickering/ refreshing and outsaving constantly, the advanced reply box isn't suffering at all.