Hi guys,

My family PC has a problem. I'm pretty much convinced that it is a problem with the BIOS or the motherboard, though I have not had the time yet to eliminate devices one by one as I only discovered the problem this morning before work - although there were signs of it happening last night.

Last night, the computer took a long time to boot up. It was stuck on the BIOS POST screen for about a minute before booting up in to Windows, which it did fine and at a normal speed, so it's not a hard drive failure of any sort. It also could boot up in to the Linux partition fine, so it's not the secondary hard drive either.

This morning, it will get past the POST. There are no error messages, no beeps, and no lights flashing from inside the system (from what I could see).

I need to put this past my parents, as I am not going to re-buy another PC for them, as I bought and built them this PC about 3 years ago, and I also just bought them a TV, as if it is a motherboard error, I'm just going to tell them £200 for a new motherboard, processor, and 2GB of DDR2 memory (no it does not need to be high end at all).

Your opinions?

Well see where it gets stuck POSTing, and then 1 by 1 remove PCI devices/RAM sticks etc.

Will give it a go. There are no PCI devices and the memory is dual-channel but I'll give it a go.

I've had some odd problems with PC's booting before. For example - a Dell Optiplex SX280 does not even reach POST if you connect the Dell 3007WFP to it. This was new to my workmates as well - they've never known for a PC to fail booting from just connecting a monitor to it. But as soon as I plugged it in to a different monitor, it worked... tried the big Dell again... failed.. strange.

Could have been a problem with Dual-link DVI or something.

Anyway, it could be one of the sticks of ram, or even the graphics. How clean is it atm?

Very.

Oh, I spilled half a glass of wine on it a week ago but it didn't go inside the computer. I'm sure I'll figure out what's going on tonight after setting up my TV.

So there's no dust build up or anything?

The problem was...

Somebody had disabled the on-board RAID controller.

The slow boot was caused by a dodgy CD that the PC was trying to boot from.

It got into Windows without the RAID controller? But aren't your HDD RAIDed?

No they're not RAIDed, but the SATA connectors are controlled by some on-board RAID controller that I guess needs to be enabled regardless of a RAID or not.

I did add a second hard drive a few days ago.

Who knows what people get up to on that PC when I'm not around!? Crazy stuff...

You could password protect the BIOS, lol.